How do I render a view after POSTing data via AJAX? - ajax

Question

I've built an app that works, and uses forms to submit data. Once submitted, the view then redirects back to display the change. Cool. Django 101. Now, instead of using forms, I'm using Ajax to submit the data via a POST call. This successfully saves the data to the database.
Now, the difficult (or maybe not, just hard to find) part is whether or not it's possible to tell Django to add the new item that has been submitted (via Ajax) to the current page, without a page refresh. At the moment, my app saves the data, and the item shows up on the page after a refresh, but this obviously isn't the required result.
If possible, I'd like to use exactly the same view and templates I'm using at the moment - essentially I'd like to know if there's a way to replace a normal HTTP request (which causes page refresh) with an Ajax call, and get the same result (using jQuery). I've hacked away at this for most of today, so any help would be appreciated, before I pull all of my hair out.

Answer 1

I had a very similar issue and this is how I got it working...
in views.py
from django.utils import simplejson
...
ctx = {some data to be returned to the page}
if ajax == True:
return HttpResponse(simplejson.dumps(ctx), mimetype='json')
then in the javascript
jQuery.ajax({
target: '#id_to_be_updated',
type: "POST",
url: "/",
dataType: 'json',
contentType: "text/javascript; charset=\"utf-8\"",
data: {
'foo':foo,
'bar':bar,
},
success: function(data){
$("#id_to_be_updated").append(data.foo);
}
});

Answer 2

Here's how I did it:
The page that has the form includes the form like so
contact.html
{% include "contact_form.html" %}
This way it's reusable.
Next I setup my view code (this view code assumes the contact form needs to be save to the db, hence the CreateView):
class ContactView(CreateView):
http_method_names = ['post']
template_name = "contact_form.html"
form_class = ContactForm
success_url = "contact_form_succes.html"
There are a few things to note here,
This view only accepts pots methods, because the form will be received through the contact.html page. For this view I've setup another template which is what we included in contact.html, the bare form.
contact_form.html
<form method="POST" action="/contact">{% crsf_token %}
{{ form.as_p }}
</form>
Now add the javascript to the contact.html page:
$("body").on("submit", 'form', function(event) {
event.preventDefault();
$("#contact").load($(this).attr("action"),
$(this).serializeArray(),
function(responseText, responseStatus) {
// response callback
});
});
This POSTS the form to the ContactView and replaces whatever is in between #contact, which is our form. You could not use jquery's .load function to achieve some what more fancy replacement of the html.
This code is based on an existing working project, but slightly modified to make explaining what happens easier.