How to properly handle an aborted HTTP request in Django

Question

Whenever a lengthy HTTP requests is aborted by the client (e.g. Browser is closed) Django views seem to raise a IOError exception.

What's the proper way to detect such an aborted request if I just want to ignore them? Just catching IOError seems too wide.. might accidentally ignore other IO problems.

Answer 1

In django 1.3 and up, you can use a logging filter class to suppress the exceptions which you aren't interested in. Here's the logging filter class I'm using to narrowly suppress IOError exceptions raised from _get_raw_post_data():

import sys, traceback
class _SuppressUnreadablePost(object):
    def filter(self, record):
        _, exception, tb = sys.exc_info()
        if isinstance(exception, IOError):
            for _, _, function, _ in traceback.extract_tb(tb):
                if function == '_get_raw_post_data':
                    return False
        return True

In Django 1.4, you will be able to do away with most of the complexity and suppress the new exception class UnreadablePostError. (See this patch).