Django: Finding part of a view's URL using {% url %}

Question

I'm having trouble getting only a part of an URL with the {% url %} tag.

The URL setup contains this:

url("^delete/(?P<uuid>[a-f0-9]{8}-[a-f0-9]{4}-[a-f0-9]{4}-[a-f0-9]{4}-[a-f0-9]{12})/$",
    deleteView,
    name = "delete"),

which means to delete an item by its UUID (the view takes a parameter "uuid" as you can see). As I don't want to change all templates when the URL mappings change, I'm using named URLs ("delete" in this example).

Then in the template, I want to access that URL via AJAX but need to provide the UUID parameter using JavaScript, so really I only need the /delete/ part of the URL. My current solution is this:

uuid = "some uuid that should be deleted on the server";

$.get("{% url myinstancenamespace:delete "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000" %}"
      .replace("00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000", uuid),
      function(data)
{
    // process server response
}, "text");

This seems more like a hack to me. So, are there any better solutions than this?

Answer 1

It doesn't sound completely hackish to me, I must say.

But if you really don't want to do it like that, one option would be to make the uuid parameter optional in the URLconf, by prefixing it with ?:. Of course you'd then need to do a bit more validation in the view to ensure that you actually did have a uuid.