There was a task to submit form with ajax, with server side validation of course. Obvious solution is to do validation and return json with erros.
I didn't like idea of writing separate view for validation and then inserting errors in form html on client side. Especially since I already had a generic template for django form with errors display.
Task
User will see process like this:
- User clicks 'edit' near article block
- article is replaced with form
- in case there are validation errors - they are shown above the form fields
- in case there are no errors - form is replaced by article html
Solution
Server will return piece of html that will replace part of page with article or form (with errors if needed). Actually this sentence is the most important part of this blog post. Implementation is very simple and straightforward.
Well actually the fact that you can return parts of html from server is also not new idea at all. It's just only now I finally understood that using this technique you can create more complicated things than modal window or tabs.
Implementation
views.py
def edit_new(request, new_id):
new = get_object_or_404(MyModel, pk=new_id)
if request.method == 'POST':
form = NewsForm(request.POST, instance=new)
if form.is_valid():
new = form.save()
return render_to_response('include/new.html', dict(new=new))
else:
form = NewsForm(instance=new)
return render_to_response('include/form.html', dict(form=form, new=new))form.html
This html will replace article block on 'edit' button click. Javascript should be moved to separate file of course.
<script type="text/javascript">
function submitAndLoad(input) {
$.ajax({
url: "{% url edit_new new.id %}",
data: $(input).parent().serialize(), // форма
type: "post",
dataType: "html",
success: function(data) {
$(input).parent().parent().html(data); // article block
}
});
return false;
};
</script>
<form>
{{ form }}
<input type="submit" value="Save" onclick="return submitAndLoad(this);"/>
</form>news_list.html
<script type="text/javascript">
function editNew(id) {
$("#new-" + id).load("{% url edit_new new.id %}");
return false;
}
</script>
<!-- ... -->
<div id="new-{{ new.id }}">
{% include "news/new.html" %}
</div>
<a onclick="return editNew({{ new.id }});" href="#">Edit</a>Code can be cleaned up of course, I just wanted to show the idea.
Update
I'm translating this article almost five years after it was originally written and of course now it seems very childish :) Now we have angular and ajax forms are implemented a little differently. Still this old solution is not all that bad. I'd still replace one thing here - it's better to return json with html from server instead of just html.
Subscribe for the news and updates
We have reviewed the top web frameworks for server and client-side development and compared their pros and cons. Find out which one can be a great fit for your next project.
Protection of WEB App is of paramount importance and it should be afforded the same level of security as the intellectual rights or private property. I'm going to cover how to protect your web app.
In this article we'll discuss some tricks you can use with Angular to make routing cleaner and improve SEO of your application.
For any project there may be a need to use a database full-text search. We expect high speed and relevant results from this search. When we face such problem, we usually think about Solr, ElasticSearch, Sphinx, AWS CloudSearch, etc. But in this article we will talk about PostgreSQL. Starting from version 8.3, a full-text search support in PostgreSQL is available. Let's look at how it is implemented in the DBMS itself.
When we use css-sprites it's important to make browser cache them for longest period possible. On other hand, we need to refresh them when they are updated. This is especially visible when all icons are stored in single sprite. When it's outdated - entire site becomes ugly.
In UNIX way, each view should solve single task. This is good idea, but sometimes we need to mix logic of different views on same page. Filter, sort, paginate, or, for example, add comment on product page. In this article I'll show how we can mix such multiple views.