HttpResponse vs. Render

Question

I was looking over some code and came to this question -- Django: What is the difference b/w HttpResponse vs HttpResponseRedirect vs render_to_response -- which discusses the different types of request responses.

Is there ever a reason to use HttpResponse over render? If so, what would be the use case and advantage of doing so? Thank you.

Answer 1

render is used to for what the name already indicates: to render a template file (mostly HTML, but could be any format). render is basically a simple wrapper around a HttpResponse which renders a template, though as said in the previous answer, you can use HttpResponse to return other things as well in the response, not just rendering templates.

Answer 2

Sure, say you're making an AJAX call and want to return a JSON object:

return HttpResponse(jsonObj, mimetype='application/json')

The accepted answer in the original question alluded to this method.