Question

I’m using Django and I want my users to confirm that they really want something to be deleted. I’m considering pure Django solution (no Javascript confirmations).
According to what I think,I can create a new page containing “Yes” and “No” buttons. If user presses “Yes”, my site will go on and delete the object from the database.
Is it the right way to do deletion without using Javascript? How would you implement the feature if you were me?

Answer 1

I would use Django’s built in DeleteView, which will display a confirmation page for an HTTP GET request and perform deletion for an HTTP POST request.

The documentation gives this example:

from django.views.generic.edit import DeleteView
from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse_lazy
from myapp.models import Author

class AuthorDelete(DeleteView):
    model = Author
    success_url = reverse_lazy('author-list')

I’d recommend reading the documentation for the SingleObjectMixin which explains how to customise the way the view finds the object to delete (the default is to look for an URL keyword argument called pk), and for the TemplateResponseMixin which explains how to customise the template that is used (the default is 'myapp/author_check_delete.html').

This is just one of a number of class-based generic views that make basic operations (displaying a page for a single model instance, for a list of model instances, and handling editing, deletion etc.) very quick and easy to implement.

If you wanted to enhance this with JavaScript later you could always write some unobtrusive JS that detects links to the deletion confirmation page (by looking for a class, or a particular URL) and adds a click handler that pops up a confirmation dialog and then sends a POST request to the URL in the link’s href attribute. You would also need to modify the view slightly to return a JSON object when request.is_ajax() is True, so that your JS would know if the deletion had succeeded or failed, which would probably involve overriding one of the methods inherited from the DeletionMixin.