Returning form errors for AJAX request in Django

Question

Hi Guys,

I've been finding my way around Django and jQuery. I've built a basic form in Django. On clicking submit, I'm using jQuey to make an AJAX request to the sever to post my data. This bit seems to work fine and I've managed to save the data. Django returns a ValidatioError when a form is invalid. Could anyone tell me how to return this set of error messages as a response to my AJAX request so i can easily iterate through it using JS and do whatever?

I found this snippet. Looking at the JS bit (processJson) you'll see that he seems to get the error messages by extracting them from the response HTML. It seems kinda kludgy to me. Is this a best way to go about it?

My apologies for any vagueness.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

When I use front-end validation, usually the response contains chunks that you can access through dot notation (dataReturned.specificData).

Based on what and how you are returning data is the key to how to access it. The more modular you handle the data returned, the easier it is to access.

// Start ajax request to server
$.ajax({
    url: '/path_to_service',
    type: 'POST',
    data: { key: value },

    // Do something with the data
    success: function(data) {
        // Data is everything that is returned from the post
        alert(data);
        // data.message could be a piece of the entire return
        alert(data.message);
    } error: function(data) { // Handle fatal errors }
});

Answer 2

You can use my adjax library to handle this for you. Install the app somewhere on your path, link the adjax.js file and add add the following to your view:

import adjax
@adjax.adjax_response
def my_view(request):
    # prepare my_form with posted data as normal
    adjax.form(request, my_form)

Enable the form using javascript after loading the adjax.js file:

 $('form').adjaxify();

And enjoy :-)

More features here: http://adjax.hardysoftware.com.au/how/ . I'll be releasing a "1.0" version in the next week, let me know how things go. Google code project is here: http://code.google.com/p/django-adjax/