Calling Django `reverse` in client-side Javascript

Question

I\'m using Django on Appengine. I\'m using the django reverse() function everywhere, keeping everything as DRY as possible.

However, I\'m having trouble

Answer 1

I like Anatoly's idea, but I think using a specific integer is dangerous. I typically want to specify an say an object id, which are always required to be positive, so I just use negative integers as placeholders. This means adding -? to the the url definition, like so:

url(r'^events/(?P<event_id>-?\d+)/$', events.views.event_details),

Then I can get the reverse url in a template by writing

{% url 'events.views.event_details' event_id=-1 %}

And use replace in javascript to replace the placeholder -1, so that in the template I would write something like

<script type="text/javascript">
var actual_event_id = 123;
var url = "{% url 'events.views.event_details' event_id=-1 %}".replace('-1', actual_event_id);
</script>

This easily extends to multiple arguments too, and the mapping for a particular argument is visible directly in the template.

Answer 2

There is another method, which doesn't require exposing the entire url structure or ajax requests for resolving each url. While it's not really beautiful, it beats the others with simplicity:

var url = '{% url blog_view_post 999 %}'.replace (999, post_id);

(blog_view_post urls must not contain the magic 999 number themselves of course.)

Answer 3

One of the solutions I came with is to generate urls on backend and pass them to browser somehow.

It may not be suitable in every case, but I have a table (populated with AJAX) and clicking on a row should take the user to the single entry from this table.

(I am using django-restframework and Datatables).

Each entry from AJAX has the url attached:

class MyObjectSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    url = SerializerMethodField()
    # other elements

    def get_url(self, obj):
       return reverse("get_my_object", args=(obj.id,))

on loading ajax each url is attached as data attribute to row:

var table = $('#my-table').DataTable({
   createdRow: function ( row, data, index ) {
      $(row).data("url", data["url"])
   }
});

and on click we use this data attribute for url:

table.on( 'click', 'tbody tr', function () {
  window.location.href = $(this).data("url");
} );

Answer 4

Use this package: https://github.com/ierror/django-js-reverse

You'll have an object in your JS with all the urls defined in django. It's the best approach I found so far.

The only thing you need to do is add the generated js in the head of your base template and run a management command to update the generated js everytime you add a url