Jquery, Redirects and Django

Whenever Jquery performs an ajax call and the response has a 302 HTTP Status (redirect), the redirection is not performed.

The response is handled by Jquery as it had a HTTP 200 status code, and that’s just not right !

I had this problem with an ajax login box:

• If username and password dont check, the server sends html, that goes to the login div.
• When login is performed, server sends a redirect response that points to a private page.

The usual solution is to send a reponse with a made up status code (usually 278), check it and handle the redirection yourself.

$(document).ready(function() {
    $('body').ajaxComplete(function(e, xhr, settings) {
        if (xhr.status == 278) {
            window.location.href = xhr.getResponseHeader("Location").replace(/\?.*$/, "?next="+window.location.pathname);
        }
    });
});

To solve this problem with django, you can create a middleware that changes the status code from redirects performed from ajax requests:

from django.http import HttpResponseRedirect
 
class AjaxRedirect(object):
    def process_response(self, request, response):
        if request.is_ajax():
            if type(response) == HttpResponseRedirect:
                response.status_code = 278
        return response