Ajax call failing in Django

Question

I have the following ajax call to update a particular field of a model

$("#updateLink").click(function(){
    var dec_text = $('#desc_text').val();

    $.ajax({
        type: "POST",
        url:"/users/update_desc/",
        data: {
        'val': dec_text,
        },
        success: function(){
            $(".display, .edit").toggle();
            $("#descText").html(dec_text);
        },
        error: function(){
            alert("Error");
        },
    });
    return false;
});

and my view is this

@csrf_exempt
def update_desc(request):
    if request.is_ajax():
        if request.method == 'POST':
            desc_text = request.POST.get('val', False)
            if desc_text:
                profile = user.profile
                profile.desc = desc_text
                profile.save()

            return_message = "Sent mail"
            return HttpResponse(return_message,mimetype='application/javascript')

I am constantly getting an error message and I don't know how to solve this. I even used the csrf_exempt decorator to workaround if the problem was caused by a missing csrf token but still the problem persists.

Except one ajax post which in my base template all the ajax calls are failing. Can anybody please help to understand what is happening here. I can give some more details if required.

Edit:

I have added the a js file containing this https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/csrf/#ajax in my base template, so it means it is present in all my templates. And I am using django 1.3 version.

Answer 1

Firstly, you are using POST and not sending a csrf token. Try explicitly sending the csrf token rather than using the decorator csrf_exempt.
One way of doing this is with what I have done in data. That is to fetch the csrf token (or from your own method) and pass it in your arguments.

$.ajax({
        url : url,
        type: "POST",
        data : {csrfmiddlewaretoken: document.getElementsByName('csrfmiddlewaretoken')[0].value},
        dataType : "json",
        success: function( data ){
            // do something
        }
    });