I am new to Django and pretty new to Ajax. I am working on a project where I need to integrate the two. I believe that I understand the principles behind them both, but have not found a good explanation of the two together.

Could someone give me a quick explanation of how the codebase must change with the two of them integrating together?

For example, can I still use the HttpResponse with Ajax, or do my responses have to change with the use of Ajax? If so, could you please provide an example of how the responses to the requests must change? If it makes any difference, the data I am returning is JSON.

Even though this isn’t entirely in the SO spirit, I love this question, because I had the same trouble when I started, so I’ll give you a quick guide. Obviously you don’t understand the principles behind them (don’t take it as an offense, but if you did you wouldn’t be asking).

Django is server-side. It means, say a client goes to a URL, you have a function inside views that renders what he sees and returns a response in HTML. Let’s break it up into examples:

views.py:

def hello(request):
    return HttpResponse('Hello World!')

def home(request):
    return render_to_response('index.html', {'variable': 'world'})

index.html:

<h1>Hello {{ variable }}, welcome to my awesome site</h1>

urls.py:

url(r'^hello/', 'myapp.views.hello'),
url(r'^home/', 'myapp.views.home'),

That’s an example of the simplest of usages. Going to 127.0.0.1:8000/hello means a request to the hello() function, going to 127.0.0.1:8000/home will return the index.html and replace all the variables as asked (you probably know all this by now).

Now let’s talk about AJAX. AJAX calls are client-side code that does asynchronous requests. That sounds complicated, but it simply means it does a request for you in the background and then handles the response. So when you do an AJAX call for some URL, you get the same data you would get as a user going to that place.

For example, an AJAX call to 127.0.0.1:8000/hello will return the same thing it would as if you visited it. Only this time, you have it inside a JavaScript function and you can deal with it however you’d like. Let’s look at a simple use case:

$.ajax({
    url: '127.0.0.1:8000/hello',
    type: 'get', // This is the default though, you don't actually need to always mention it
    success: function(data) {
        alert(data);
    },
    failure: function(data) { 
        alert('Got an error dude');
    }
}); 

The general process is this:

1. The call goes to the URL 127.0.0.1:8000/hello as if you opened a new tab and did it yourself.
2. If it succeeds (status code 200), do the function for success, which will alert the data received.
3. If fails, do a different function.

Now what would happen here? You would get an alert with ‘hello world’ in it. What happens if you do an AJAX call to home? Same thing, you’ll get an alert stating <h1>Hello world, welcome to my awesome site</h1>.

In other words – there’s nothing new about AJAX calls. They are just a way for you to let the user get data and information without leaving the page, and it makes for a smooth and very neat design of your website. A few guidelines you should take note of:

1. Learn jQuery. I cannot stress this enough. You’re gonna have to understand it a little to know how to handle the data you receive. You’ll also need to understand some basic JavaScript syntax (not far from python, you’ll get used to it). I strongly recommend Envato’s video tutorials for jQuery, they are great and will put you on the right path.
2. When to use JSON?. You’re going to see a lot of examples where the data sent by the Django views is in JSON. I didn’t go into detail on that, because it isn’t important how to do it (there are plenty of explanations abound) and a lot more important when. And the answer to that is – JSON data is serialized data. That is, data you can manipulate. Like I mentioned, an AJAX call will fetch the response as if the user did it himself. Now say you don’t want to mess with all the html, and instead want to send data (a list of objects perhaps). JSON is good for this, because it sends it as an object (JSON data looks like a python dictionary), and then you can iterate over it or do something else that removes the need to sift through useless html.
3. Add it last. When you build a web app and want to implement AJAX – do yourself a favor. First, build the entire app completely devoid of any AJAX. See that everything is working. Then, and only then, start writing the AJAX calls. That’s a good process that helps you learn a lot as well.
4. Use chrome’s developer tools. Since AJAX calls are done in the background it’s sometimes very hard to debug them. You should use the chrome developer tools (or similar tools such as firebug) and console.log things to debug. I won’t explain in detail, just google around and find out about it. It would be very helpful to you.
5. CSRF awareness. Finally, remember that post requests in Django require the csrf_token. With AJAX calls, a lot of times you’d like to send data without refreshing the page. You’ll probably face some trouble before you’d finally remember that – wait, you forgot to send the csrf_token. This is a known beginner roadblock in AJAX-Django integration, but after you learn how to make it play nice, it’s easy as pie.

That’s everything that comes to my head. It’s a vast subject, but yeah, there’s probably not enough examples out there. Just work your way there, slowly, you’ll get it eventually.

Further from yuvi’s excellent answer, I would like to add a small specific example on how to deal with this within Django (beyond any js that will be used). The example uses AjaxableResponseMixin and assumes an Author model.

import json

from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.views.generic.edit import CreateView
from myapp.models import Author

class AjaxableResponseMixin(object):
    """
    Mixin to add AJAX support to a form.
    Must be used with an object-based FormView (e.g. CreateView)
    """
    def render_to_json_response(self, context, **response_kwargs):
        data = json.dumps(context)
        response_kwargs['content_type'] = 'application/json'
        return HttpResponse(data, **response_kwargs)

    def form_invalid(self, form):
        response = super(AjaxableResponseMixin, self).form_invalid(form)
        if self.request.is_ajax():
            return self.render_to_json_response(form.errors, status=400)
        else:
            return response

    def form_valid(self, form):
        # We make sure to call the parent's form_valid() method because
        # it might do some processing (in the case of CreateView, it will
        # call form.save() for example).
        response = super(AjaxableResponseMixin, self).form_valid(form)
        if self.request.is_ajax():
            data = {
                'pk': self.object.pk,
            }
            return self.render_to_json_response(data)
        else:
            return response

class AuthorCreate(AjaxableResponseMixin, CreateView):
    model = Author
    fields = ['name']

Source: Django documentation, Form handling with class-based views

The link to version 1.6 of Django is no longer available updated to version 1.11

I am writing this because the accepted answer is pretty old, it needs a refresher.

So this is how I would integrate Ajax with Django in 2019 :) And lets take a real example of when we would need Ajax :-

Lets say I have a model with registered usernames and with the help of Ajax I wanna know if a given username exists.

html:

<p id="response_msg"></p> 
<form id="username_exists_form" method='GET'>
      Name: <input type="username" name="username" />
      <button type='submit'> Check </button>           
</form>   

ajax:

$('#username_exists_form').on('submit',function(e){
    e.preventDefault();
    var username = $(this).find('input').val();
    $.get('/exists/',
          {'username': username},   
          function(response){ $('#response_msg').text(response.msg); }
    );
}); 

urls.py:

from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path
from . import views

urlpatterns = [
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
    path('exists/', views.username_exists, name='exists'),
]

views.py:

def username_exists(request):
    data = {'msg':''}   
    if request.method == 'GET':
        username = request.GET.get('username').lower()
        exists = Usernames.objects.filter(name=username).exists()
        if exists:
            data['msg'] = username + ' already exists.'
        else:
            data['msg'] = username + ' does not exists.'
    return JsonResponse(data)

Also render_to_response which is deprecated and has been replaced by render and from Django 1.7 onwards instead of HttpResponse we use JsonResponse for ajax response. Because it comes with a JSON encoder, so you don’t need to serialize the data before returning the response object but HttpResponse is not deprecated.

Simple and Nice. You don’t have to change your views. Bjax handles all your links. Check this out: Bjax

Usage:

<script src="bjax.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<link href="bjax.min.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

Finally, include this in the HEAD of your html:

$('a').bjax();

For more settings, checkout demo here: Bjax Demo

AJAX is the best way to do asynchronous tasks. Making asynchronous calls is something common in use in any website building. We will take a short example to learn how we can implement AJAX in Django. We need to use jQuery so as to write less javascript.

This is Contact example, which is the simplest example, I am using to explain the basics of AJAX and its implementation in Django. We will be making POST request in this example. I am following one of the example of this post: https://djangopy.org/learn/step-up-guide-to-implement-ajax-in-django

models.py

Let’s first create the model of Contact, having basic details.

from django.db import models

class Contact(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length = 100)
    email = models.EmailField()
    message = models.TextField()
    timestamp = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add = True)

    def __str__(self):
        return self.name

forms.py

Create the form for the above model.

from django import forms
from .models import Contact

class ContactForm(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = Contact
        exclude = ["timestamp", ]

views.py

The views look similar to the basic function-based create view, but instead of returning with render, we are using JsonResponse response.

from django.http import JsonResponse
from .forms import ContactForm

def postContact(request):
    if request.method == "POST" and request.is_ajax():
        form = ContactForm(request.POST)
        form.save()
        return JsonResponse({"success":True}, status=200)
    return JsonResponse({"success":False}, status=400)

urls.py

Let’s create the route of the above view.

from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path
from app_1 import views as app1

urlpatterns = [
    path('ajax/contact', app1.postContact, name ='contact_submit'),
]

template

Moving to frontend section, render the form which was created above enclosing form tag along with csrf_token and submit button. Note that we have included the jquery library.

<form id = "contactForm" method= "POST">{% csrf_token %}
   {{ contactForm.as_p }}
  <input type="submit" name="contact-submit" class="btn btn-primary" />
</form>

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.3.1/jquery.min.js"></script>

Javascript

Let’s now talk about javascript part, on the form submit we are making ajax request of type POST, taking the form data and sending to the server side.

$("#contactForm").submit(function(e){
    // prevent from normal form behaviour
        e.preventDefault();
        // serialize the form data  
        var serializedData = $(this).serialize();
        $.ajax({
            type : 'POST',
            url :  "{% url 'contact_submit' %}",
            data : serializedData,
            success : function(response){
            //reset the form after successful submit
                $("#contactForm")[0].reset(); 
            },
            error : function(response){
                console.log(response)
            }
        });
   });

This is just a basic example to get started with AJAX with django, if you want to get dive with several more examples, you can go through this article: https://djangopy.org/learn/step-up-guide-to-implement-ajax-in-django

I have tried to use AjaxableResponseMixin in my project, but had ended up with the following error message:

ImproperlyConfigured: No URL to redirect to. Either provide a url or define a get_absolute_url method on the Model.

That is because the CreateView will return a redirect response instead of returning a HttpResponse when you to send JSON request to the browser. So I have made some changes to the AjaxableResponseMixin. If the request is an ajax request, it will not call the super.form_valid method, just call the form.save() directly.

from django.http import JsonResponse
from django import forms
from django.db import models

class AjaxableResponseMixin(object):
    success_return_code = 1
    error_return_code = 0
    """
    Mixin to add AJAX support to a form.
    Must be used with an object-based FormView (e.g. CreateView)
    """
    def form_invalid(self, form):
        response = super(AjaxableResponseMixin, self).form_invalid(form)
        if self.request.is_ajax():
            form.errors.update({'result': self.error_return_code})
            return JsonResponse(form.errors, status=400)
        else:
            return response

    def form_valid(self, form):
        # We make sure to call the parent's form_valid() method because
        # it might do some processing (in the case of CreateView, it will
        # call form.save() for example).
        if self.request.is_ajax():
            self.object = form.save()
            data = {
                'result': self.success_return_code
            }
            return JsonResponse(data)
        else:
            response = super(AjaxableResponseMixin, self).form_valid(form)
            return response

class Product(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField('product name', max_length=255)

class ProductAddForm(forms.ModelForm):
    '''
    Product add form
    '''
    class Meta:
        model = Product
        exclude = ['id']


class PriceUnitAddView(AjaxableResponseMixin, CreateView):
    '''
    Product add view
    '''
    model = Product
    form_class = ProductAddForm

When we use Django:

Server ===> Client(Browser)   
      Send a page

When you click button and send the form,
----------------------------
Server <=== Client(Browser)  
      Give data back. (data in form will be lost)
Server ===> Client(Browser)  
      Send a page after doing sth with these data
----------------------------

If you want to keep old data, you can do it without Ajax. (Page will be refreshed)

Server ===> Client(Browser)   
      Send a page
Server <=== Client(Browser)  
      Give data back. (data in form will be lost)
Server ===> Client(Browser)  
      1. Send a page after doing sth with data
      2. Insert data into form and make it like before. 
      After these thing, server will send a html page to client. It means that server do more work, however, the way to work is same.

Or you can do with Ajax (Page will be not refreshed)

--------------------------
<Initialization> 
Server ===> Client(Browser) [from URL1]    
      Give a page                      
--------------------------  
<Communication>
Server <=== Client(Browser)     
      Give data struct back but not to refresh the page.
Server ===> Client(Browser) [from URL2] 
      Give a data struct(such as JSON)
---------------------------------

If you use Ajax, you must do these:

1. Initial a HTML page using URL1 (we usually initial page by Django template). And then server send client a html page.
2. Use Ajax to communicate with server using URL2. And then server send client a data struct.

Django is different from Ajax. The reason for this is as follows:

• The thing return to client is different. The case of Django is HTML page. The case of Ajax is data struct.　
• Django is good at creating something, but it only can create once, it cannot change anything. Django is like anime, consist of many picture. By contrast, Ajax is not good at creating sth but good at change sth in exist html page.

In my opinion, if you would like to use ajax everywhere. when you need to initial a page with data at first, you can use Django with Ajax. But in some case, you just need a static page without anything from server, you need not use Django template.

If you don’t think Ajax is the best practice. you can use Django template to do everything, like anime.

(My English is not good)