Question

So I have this form (some elements removed for clarity)

<form id="{{ section }}-submission-form{{ cell_id }}">

    <input type=hidden name="section" value="{{ section }}" />
    <input type="hidden" name="school" id="{{ section }}-submit-school{{ cell_id }}" />


    {% if section == "posts" %}
        <input type=hidden name="url" />
        <textarea class="{{ section }}txtinput{{ cell_id }}" name="text-submission"
                  default="{% if is_advice %}What's your question?{% else %}What's on your mind?{% endif %}"
                  id="{{ section }}-suggestion-box{{ cell_id }}"
                  style="margin: 0 0 .5em 0;font-family: Arial, sans-serif;font-size: 14px; width: 410px;"
                  rows='8'></textarea>
        <br />
    {% endif %}
    {% if section == "photos" %}
        <span style='line-height: 40px;'>
        <label class="photouploadlabel">URL</label><input type="text" name="image-url" style="width: 335px" /><br>
        <label class="photouploadlabel">File</label><input type="file" name="image-file" style="width: 335px"/><br>
        <label class="photouploadlabel">Caption</label><input type="text" id="image-caption{{ cell_id }}"
                                                              name="image-caption" style="width: 335px" default="optional"/>
        </span>
    {% endif %}


    <div id="{{ section }}-bottomdiv{{ cell_id }}" style="height: 45px; margin-top: .5em; width: 413px;">
        <div style="height: 45px">
        <label id="{{ section }}-tagsbutton{{ cell_id }}"
               style="margin-right: .5em; cursor: pointer; vertical-align: bottom; float:left; line-height: 1.8em;">Tags</label>

        <input id="{{ section }}-tagsinput{{ cell_id }}" type="text" name="tags-list" style="position: relative"/>
                    <button id="send-{{ section }}-suggestion{{ cell_id }}" disabled="disabled"
                style="float:right; position: relative; bottom: 7px; right: -4px;">Post</button>
        </div>

The tags-list input is turned into an autocomplete and users select tags, which are then added to a global js variable “selected tags”. When the user presses “Post”, I have this code:

           alert(selectedtags);
       $("#"+section+"-submission-form"+cellid).ajaxSubmit({
           url: '/save-suggestion/',
           type: 'post',
           data: {'tags': selectedtags },
           dataType: 'json',
           success: function(response){
               clear_text(section, cellid);
               location.reload();
           },

Here’s the weird bit: whichever section I’m in, the alert works. However, if I print request.REQUEST on the server side, if the section is photos I get

{u'image-url': u'http://i.imgur.com/vUxla.jpg', u'tags-list': u'', u'tags': u'wtf,crazy,pics', u'section': u'photos', u'school': u'1997', u'anonymity-level': u'schoolandmajor', u'image-file': u'', u'image-caption': u''}

i.e. what I want. But if the section is posts, I get

{u'text-submission': u'wtf', u'school': u'1997', u'tags-list': u'', u'url': u'', u'section': u'posts', u'tags[]': u'crazy', u'anonymity-level': u'schoolandmajor'}

So not only is it renamed to tags[] (which I’ve seen before and am not too concerned about, but…), it also truncates my tag list to just the last entry.

Does anyone have any idea what I could be doing wrong?

EDIT: upon further inspection, this is something that using request.REQUEST is doing, as opposed to request.POST.

So, still, what is going on?

Answer 1

request.REQUEST is a MergedDict which contains a QueryDict for POST and one for GET. When iterating the MergedDict, you will get single values for each key, which is what the __str__ method does for that class. You can get around this by using QueryDict.getlist like so:

print request.REQUEST.getlist('tags[]')

Which in my test, yields:

[u'asd', u'123']

If I just print request.REQUEST['tags[]'], I get just 123.