How do I detect an aborted connection in Django?

Question

I have a Django view that does some pretty heavy processing and takes around 20-30 seconds to return a result.

Sometimes the user will end up closing the browser window (terminating the connection) before the request completes -- in that case, I'd like to be able to detect this and stop working. The work I do is read-only on the database so there isn't any issue with transactions.

In PHP the connection_aborted function does exactly this. Is this functionality available in Django?

Here's example code I'd like to write:

def myview(request):
    while not connection_aborted():
        # do another bit of work...
        if work_complete:
            return HttpResponse('results go here')

Thanks.

Answer 1

I don't think Django provides it because it basically can't. More than Django itself, this depends on the way Django interfaces with your web server. All this depends on your software stack (which you have not specified). I don't think it's even part of the FastCGI and WSGI protocols!

Edit: I'm also pretty sure that Django does not start sending any data to the client until your view finishes execution, so it can't possibly know if the connection is dead. The underlying socket won't trigger an error unless the server tries to send some data back to the user.