Question

So I’ve been following this tutorial http://webcloud.se/log/AJAX-in-Django-with-jQuery/, and the get method works fine. i.e. I get a popup saying what it should say in the popup. However when I use the post method instead I don’t get anything. It appears that the request doesn’t even reach my view.

This is what my bit of javascript dealing with this looks like:

$(document).ready(function(){

    $("#popupbutton").click(function(){
        $.post("/launch_instances", { 
                name: "Monty",
                food: "Spam" 
            },
            function(data) {
                alert(data);
            }
        );
     });
 ...................

This are the related bit of my template:

<center>
   <div id="popupbutton"><input type="submit" value="Launch Instances!" /></div>
</center>

And here is my views.py:

from django.http import HttpResponse

def li_view(request):
    return HttpResponse("post gets to the view")
    if request.is_ajax():
        if request.method == 'GET':
            message = "This is an XHR GET request"
        elif request.method == 'POST':
            message = "This is an XHR POST request"
        else:
            message = "Nothing"
    else:
        message = "No XHR"

    return HttpResponse(message)

As you can see the first thing I do when I get to my view is return a HttpResponse, but when I am using post I don’t see any popup like I do when I am using get. So my guess is that for some reason the request doesn’t even reach the view.

This is what my urls.py:

from django.conf.urls import patterns, include, url
from django.contrib import admin

admin.autodiscover()

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
    url(r'^launch_instances/', 'simdata.views.li_view'),

    # Uncomment the admin/doc line below to enable admin documentation:
    # url(r'^admin/doc/', include('django.contrib.admindocs.urls')),
)

There have been similar questions around but nothing as bizzare as this. I’m new to django/ajax/jquery so probably missing something very small.

Thanks in advance 🙂

Answer 1

Oh! Wow. That is such a small bug, it took me a while of staring at your code to spot it. You’re requesting /launch_instances (notice without the trailing slash at the end). When Django encounters this, it automatically redirects the request to /launch_instances/ (with trailing slash), but through the redirection, the POST data is dropped. Add the trailing slash, and you should be golden.