How do I integrate Ajax with Django applications?

Question

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

Answer 1

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