Is there a way to get a referring URL via a custom HTTP header?

Question

I am currently using the following function to get a referring view:

def get_referer_view(request, default=None):   
    referer = request.META.get('HTTP_REFERER')
    if not referer:
        return default

    # remove the protocol and split the url at the slashes
    referer = re.sub('^https?:\/\/', '', referer).split('/')
    if referer[0] != request.META.get('SERVER_NAME'):
        return default

    # add the slash at the relative path's view and finished
    referer = u'/' + u'/'.join(referer[1:])
    return referer

If I redirected the view as a result of programmatic logic, e.g...

return HttpResponseRedirect('dashboard')

...is there a way to get the referring view without using HTTP_REFERER so that I can use that variable in the redirected view? This is not always set in the headers of the browser.

Note because the views are redirected pro grammatically, I can't use POST to collect the data.

Perhaps its possible to set and retrieve a custom header somehow?

Answer 1

Use Django's middleware component.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.0/topics/http/middleware/

Something like this should work:

class HTTPReferer:

    def __init__(self, get_response):
        self.get_response = get_response

def __call__old(self, request):
    # old
    referer = request.META.get('HTTP_REFERER', None)
    request.referer = referer
    # other business logic as you like it
    response = self.get_response(request)
    return response

def __call__(self, request):
    # reflecting last edit
    path = request.path
    response = self.get_response(request)
    response['previous_path'] = path
    return response

So you could tie any information you need to every request/response cycle in Django (you could also set custom headers, etc...)

In the example above HTTP_REFERER will be available in request object as referer.

EDIT: I think, you concern is that HTTP_REFERER is not always populated by the client; so you could tie HttpRequest.path to every request made to a custom header. If path is not enough, you could save the request args too. That's all, I think. Then you have a custom header populated by the last path. Further on, if this is not enough, you could use Django's URL resolver.