How do I send empty response in Django without templates

Question

I have written a view which responds to ajax requests from browser. It's written like so -

@login_required def no_response(request):     params = request.has_key("params")     if params:         # do processing         var = RequestContext(request, {vars})         return render_to_response('some_template.html', var)     else: #some error         # I want to send an empty string so that the          # client-side javascript can display some error string.          return render_to_response("") #this throws an error without a template. 

How do i do it?

Here's how I handle the server response on client-side -

    $.ajax     ({         type     : "GET",         url      : url_sr,         dataType : "html",         cache    : false,         success  : function(response)         {             if(response)                 $("#resp").html(response);             else                 $("#resp").html("<div id='no'>No data</div>");         }     }); 

Answer 1

render_to_response is a shortcut specifically for rendering a template. If you don't want to do that, just return an empty HttpResponse:

 from django.http import HttpResponse  return HttpResponse('') 

However, in this circumstance I wouldn't do that - you're signalling to the AJAX that there was an error, so you should return an error response, possibly code 400 - which you can do by using HttpResponseBadRequest instead.