What is the use of POST, GET methods in AJAX requests?

The POST request in AJAX is used to post data to the server, changing or manipulating the data in the database. At the same time, the GET request in AJAX helps retrieve the data from the server, which does not require any change or manipulation in the database.

Table of contents

Introduction

How AJAX Works

Initial Setup

Making templates to carry out ajax requests in Django

Handling Ajax requests in Django

Frequently Asked Questions

Key Takeaways

Last Updated: Mar 27, 2024

Handling Ajax requests in Django

Author Tanay kumar Deo

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Introduction

Django is one of Python's most popular, trusted, and reliable web development frameworks. With Django, we can quickly create web applications without worrying about installation or dependency problems that we usually find with other frameworks.

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) allows websites to update asynchronously by exchanging data from the server. It means that we can update parts of our website without reloading it completely. It involves a combination of a browser-in-built XMLHttpRequest object, HTML DOM, and JavaScript.

In the article, we will learn how to handle Ajax requests in Django.

How AJAX Works

There are many scenarios where we may make POST and GET requests to post and load data from the server asynchronously. Additionally, we can make our web application more dynamic and reduce the page load time with the help of Ajax. Some such scenarios are:

When an event occurs on the web application, such as a first-page load, link or button click, form submission, etc.,
When an XMLHttpRequest object is created to send the request to the server.
When the server responds to the requests.
When the response is captured, the server responds with response data.

How AJAX works

This article will make an app to validate if the username field is available as soon as the user enters the username. We will perform a simple check to see whether the username is already taken or not.

Initial Setup

First of all, we will create a project for handling Ajax requests in Django,

$ django-admin startproject django_ajax_example

The above command will create the Django project. Now let's make an app called "Coding Ninjas Studio” for the project by writing the following commands,

$ cd django_example
$ python manage.py startapp Coding Ninjas Studio

Making templates to carry out ajax requests in Django

In this article, we will use the jQuery library to implement JavaScript easily. Let's add jQuery in our Django application using jQuery CDN in the base.html file of the application,

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>AJAX example</title>
</head>
<body>
    {% block content %}
    {% endblock %}
    <script src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.6.0.min.js"></script>
    <script src="{% static 'js/app.js' %}"></script>
</body>
</html>

You can also try this code with Online Python Compiler

Run Code

We added jQuery version - 3.6.0 using jQuery CDN in the above code. In the code, we can see that we have a file app.js in the root/js directory; we will write all our javascript code in the app.js file.

Now, we will write for the urls.py file,

from django.urls import path
from . import views


urlpatterns = [
    # index view at /
    path('/',views.index,name="index"),
]

You can also try this code with Online Python Compiler

Run Code

We will create our view.py file as,

from django.shortcuts import render
from django.http import HttpResponse


def index(request):
    return render(request,'register.html')

You can also try this code with Online Python Compiler

Run Code

Our view.py file will render the register.html file as a template. Code for register.html is written as,

{% extends 'base.html' %}


{% block content %}
<div>
<h1>Sign Up</h1>
<form method="POST" enctype="multipart/form-data">
    {% csrf_token %}
    <input type="text" id="username" placeholder="Username"><br>
    <input type="password" placeholder="Password"><br>
    <input type="password" placeholder="Repeat Password"><br>
    <input type="button" value="Submit">
</form>
</div>
{% endblock %}

You can also try this code with Online Python Compiler

Run Code

In the above code for the register.html template, we built a signup form to take input from the username and password field. Let's look at the output after rendering the template,

OUTPUT

Handling Ajax requests in Django

Till now, we have successfully created a signup form using Django templates. Now let's add ajax requests in the Django project to check whether the username is taken as soon as the user enters the username. We will use the id of the username field to add a listener to its change events.

In our app.js file in the root/js directory, we will write all our javascript code,

$("#username").change(function () {
        var usernameVar = $(this).val();
        $.ajaxSetup({
            headers: {
                "X-CSRFToken": document.querySelector('[name=csrfmiddlewaretoken]').value,
            }
        });
        $.ajax({
        url: 'validate',
        method: 'POST',
        data: {
          'username': usernameVar
        },
        dataType: 'json',
        success: function (data) {
          if (data.taken) {
            alert("The Username is taken");
          }
        }
        });
    });

You can also try this code with Online Python Compiler

Run Code

In the code above, the change event will trigger every time there is a change in the username value. We are using the POST method for the Ajax request (we can use any method according to our needs). And we can see that the success function is triggered if the username is already taken, which alerts the text "The username is taken".

We will update our view.py file to validate username data by adding the below code

from django.shortcuts import render
from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.contrib.auth.models import user


def index(request):
    return render(request,'register.html')


def validateUsername(request):
    username = request.POST['username']
    data = {
        'taken' : User.objects.filter(username__iexact=username).exists()
    }
    return JsonResponse(data)

You can also try this code with Online Python Compiler

Run Code

In the above code, view.py is updated by adding the validateUsername function to check if the username is taken or not.

Now Let's update our urls.py file according to our updated view.py file. The updated code for urls.py is as,

from django.urls import path
from . import views


urlpatterns = [
    # index view at /
    path('/',views.index,name="index"),
    path('validate',views.validateuname,name="validate")
]

You can also try this code with Online Python Compiler

Run Code

Now let's see if the validation of username by ajax requests in Django works appropriately in our browser,

(OUTPUT)

Frequently Asked Questions

What is AJAX?
AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) allows websites to update asynchronously by exchanging data from the server.
What is the use of POST, GET methods in AJAX requests?
The POST request in AJAX is used to post data to the server, changing or manipulating the data in the database. At the same time, the GET request in AJAX helps retrieve the data from the server, which does not require any change or manipulation in the database.

Key Takeaways

Using examples, this article taught us how to handle Ajax requests in Django Model. We built a Django project with a signup page and validated if the username entered by the user is already taken or not by making Ajax requests.

Don't stop here. Check out the blogs Best Django Books, Top 30 Basic Django Interview Questions: Part 1, and Top 30 Intermediate Django Interview Questions: Part 2.

We hope you found this blog helpful. Liked the blog? Then feel free to upvote and share it.

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