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 applying this to my client-side javascript. There is a JS class that loads some data depending on a passed-in ID. Is there a standard way to not-hardcode the URL that this data should come from?

var rq = new Request.HTML({     'update':this.element, }).get('/template/'+template_id+'/preview'); //The part that bothers me. 

Answer 1

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 2

Having just struggled with this, I came up with a slightly different solution.

In my case, I wanted an external JS script to invoke an AJAX call on a button click (after doing some other processing).

In the HTML, I used an HTML-5 custom attribute thus

<button ... id="test-button" data-ajax-target="{% url 'named-url' %}"> 

Then, in the javascript, simply did

$.post($("#test-button").attr("data-ajax-target"), ... ); 

Which meant Django's template system did all the reverse() logic for me.