Django ajax formatting convention

Question

What's the correct way to do an ajax request, I've seen people using a returning render_to_string so that they can do all their formatting within python using the template language. eg~

return render_to_string('calendar.html', {
'self' : self,
'month' : self.today.month,})

with this as the javascript:

$('#django_calendar_response').html(response)

But I've also seen people formatting their output within javascript using dom functions such as

return HttpResponse(serializers.serialize("json",
ilst, relations=('user',)), "application/json")

where the javascript is

items_display=function(items){
    return LI(null,
    A({'class':'userlink',
    'href':'/url/user/'+items.fields.user.fields.name},
    items.fields.user.fields.name),

is one of these correct and the other wrong? should I format my output in javascript or within python?

Answer 1

I've been using JSON exclusively for AJAX, with simplejson returning whatever data is really easy, it looks like this:

from django.utils import simplejson
reply = simplejson.dumps({'comment_body': formatted_post, 'user_icon': request.user.profile.image.url })
return HttpResponse(reply, mimetype="application/json")

and on the client side, with jquery's .post method handling a json reply is really easy too, you can specify json as your datatype:

$.post("/postcomment/", { body: comment_body },
  function(data){
    alert(data.comment_body)
  }, "json");

I'm not saying this is the best solution, but it's proven to be very robust and easy to handle...

Hope this helps,

Martin

Answer 2

I do both. Sometimes I have short template snippets that I {% include %} in the big page template. It is often more DRY to render these and return the html to insert into the DOM (since the code is already set-up) than to have to write JS to do it (again). Other times, I just generate some JSON and inject that into the DOM.

Shortly, you can mix and match for the situation.