Returning form errors for AJAX request in Django

Question

I've been finding my way around Django and jQuery. I've built a basic form in Django. On clicking submit, I'm using jQuery to make an AJAX request to the sever to post my data. This bit seems to work fine and I've managed to save the data. Django returns a ValidationError when a form is invalid. Could anyone tell me how to return this set of error messages as a response to my AJAX request so I can easily iterate through it using JS and do whatever?

I found this snippet. Looking at the JS bit (processJson) you'll see that he seems to get the error messages by extracting them from the response HTML. It seems kinda kludgy to me. Is this the best way to go about it?

My apologies for any vagueness.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

This question is old, but I think the shortest answer might be using simple json in a view like this.

from django.utils import simplejson

def ajax(request):
    if request.method == 'POST':
        form = someForm(request.POST)
        if form.is_valid():
            form.save()
            return HttpResponse(something)
        else:
            errors = form.errors
            return HttpResponse(simplejson.dumps(errors))
    else:
        return HttpResponse(something)

now you can access the data in your jquery like Calvin described above. Jquery makes it easy to handle the data, You could do something like this:

var errors = jQuery.parseJSON(data)
    alert(errors.username)