django-pjax 1.2

What’s PJAX?

PJAX is essentially AHAH (“Asynchronous HTML and HTTP”), except with real permalinks and a working back button. It lets you load just a portion of a page (so things are faster) while still maintaining the usability of real links.

A demo makes more sense, so check out the one defunkt put together

Usage

First, read about how to use jQuery-PJAX and pick one of the techniques there.

Next, make sure the views you’re PJAXing are using TemplateResponse. You can’t use Django-PJAX with a normal HttpResponse; only TemplateResponse. Decorate these views with the pjax decorator:

from djpjax import pjax

@pjax()
def my_view(request):
    return TemplateResponse(request, "template.html", {'my': 'context'})

After doing this, if the request is made via jQuery-PJAX, the @pjax() decorator will automatically swap out template.html for template-pjax.html.

More formally: if the request is a PJAX request, the template used in your TemplateResponse will be replaced with one with -pjax before the file extension. So template.html becomes template-pjax.html, my.template.xml becomes my.template-pjax.xml, etc. If there’s no file extension, the template name will just be suffixed with -pjax.

You can also manually pick a PJAX template by passing it as an argument to the decorator:

from djpjax import pjax

@pjax("pjax.html")
def my_view(request):
    return TemplateResponse(request, "template.html", {'my': 'context'})

If you’d like to use Django 1.3’s class-based views instead, a PJAX Mixin class is provided as well. Simply use PJAXResponseMixin where you would normally have used TemplateResponseMixin, and your template_name will be treated the same way as above. You can alternately provide a pjax_template_name class variable if you want a specific template used for PJAX responses:

from django.views.generic import View
from djpjax import PJAXResponseMixin

class MyView(PJAXResponseMixin, View):
    template_name = "template.html"
    pjax_template_name = "pjax.html"

    def get(self, request):
        return self.render_to_response({'my': 'context'})

That’s it!

Using Template Extensions

If the content in your template-pjax.html file is very similar to your template.html an alternative method of operation is to use the decorator pjaxtend, as follows:

from djpjax import pjaxtend

@pjaxtend
def my_view(request):
    return TemplateResponse(request, "template.html", {'my': 'context'})

Then, in your template.html file you can do the following:

{% extends parent %}
...
...

Note that the template will extend base.html unless its a pjax request in which case it will extend pjax.html.

If you want to define the parent for a standard http or pjax request, you can do so as follows:

from djpjax import pjaxtend

@pjaxtend('someapp/base.html', 'my-pjax-extension.html')
def my_view(request):
    return TemplateResponse(request, "template.html", {'my': 'context'})

Using this approach you don’t need to create many *-pjax.html files.

If you have a collision with the variable name parent you can specify the context variable to use as the third parameter to pjaxtexd, as follows:

    from djpjax import pjaxtend

@pjaxtend('someapp/base.html', 'my-pjax-extension.html', 'my_parent')
def my_view(request):
    return TemplateResponse(request, "template.html", {'my': 'context'})

Which would require the following in your template:

{% extends my_parent %} … …

Testing

Tests are run using nosetests. To install:

pip install nose

And to run the tests:

nosetests tests.py