How do I redirect in Django with context?

Question

I have a view that validates and saves a form. After the form is saved, I'd like redirect back to a list_object view with a success message "form for customer xyz was successfully updated..."

HttpResponseRedirect doesn't seem like it would work, because it only has an argument for the url, no way to pass dictionary with it.

I've tried modifying my wrapper for object_list to take a dict as a parameter that has the necessary context. I the return a call to this wrapper from inside the view that saves the form. However, when the page is rendered, the url is '/customer_form/' rather than '/list_customers/'. I tried modifying the request object, before passing it to the object_list wrapper, but that did not work.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Do you have control over the view that you are redirecting to? In that case you can save the context in the session before redirecting. The target view can pick up the context (and delete it) from the session and use it to render the template.

If your only requirement is to display a message then there is a better way to do this. Your first view can create a message for the current using auth and have the second view read and delete it. Something like this:

def save_form(request, *args, **kwargs):
    # all goes well
    message = _("form for customer xyz was successfully updated...")
    request.user.message_set.create(message = message)
    return redirect('list_view')

def list_view(request, *args, **kwargs):
    # Render page

# Template for list_view:
{% for message in messages %}
   ... 
{% endfor %}

Messages are saved to the database. This means that you can access them even after a redirect. They are automatically read and deleted on rendering the template. You will have to use RequestContext for this to work.