django-ajaxmiddleware

To develop a website with progressive enhancement means being able to return a basic page for non-js clients, and ajax responses to enhance the design when javascript is enabled on the client.

Your views have to render html or json depending if the request is text/html or application/json.

Today, tons of solutions exist, and every developer cook its own way to handle that.

This application remove the pain to handle this.

Installation

First, install the application:

(your_venv)$ pip install django-ajaxmiddleware

Then, add the new middleware in your settings:

from django.conf.global_settings import MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES
MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES += ('ajaxmiddleware.middleware.AjaxMiddleware',)

Finally, add in your view a get_json_context function:

from django.views.generic import CreateView

class FoobarCreateView(CreateView):
    def get_json_context(self, **kwargs):
        return {
            "foo": "bar",
        }

Your view is now able to return the json context if called from a ajax request.

For the url:

url(r'foobar/create/', FoobarCreateView.as_view())

You can verify the json response with curl:

$ curl -X GET -H 'Content-type: application/json' http://uri/foobar/create/
{"foo": "bar"}
$

$ curl -d "username=bobthesponge&password=test123&curl" -L -H 'Content-type: application/json' http://127.0.0.1:8000/accounts/login/\?next\=/testview/

Limitations

• Currently work only for django >= 1.3 with class-based views.

TODO

• allow a get_json_response or a convert_context_to_json
• write tests to cover Date-based views

BONUS

You can use the decorator ajaxmiddleware.decorators.html_ajax_test for your own tests to insure html and ajax requests are covered correctly:

from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse
from django.test import TestCase
from ajaxmiddleware.decorators import html_ajax_test


class ViewsTestCase(TestCase):

    @html_ajax_test(url="/some/url/"))
    def test_templateview(self):
        """Tests for TemplateView with html and ajax requests"""
        pass

    @html_ajax_test(url=lambda: reverse("another_url"))
    def test_detailview(self):
        """Isn't it nicer to give a reverse url to the decorator ?"""
        pass

You can also add the ajaxmiddleware logger to get a verbose output while running these tests (see testapp.settings.LOGGING)