Transferring data between views in Django forms a crucial aspect of web application development on this popular Python-based web framework. Below we will discuss how this can be achieved using Django views and Django context processors.
Django uses a concept called “views” to encapsulate the logic responsible for processing a user’s request and for returning the response. According to Django’s official documentation, views take a Web request and return a Web response. This response may be the HTML contents of a Web page, a redirect, a 404 error, an XML document, an image, or anything else.
In a Django application, you might want to share some piece of information across several views. For instance, you might want to pass user-related data from one view to another. This can be done using Django Sessions or Cookies.
1. Django Sessions: Django provides a sessions framework that allows you to store and retrieve arbitrary data on a per-site-visitor basis. It stores data on the server side and abstracts the receiving and sending of cookies. According to Django’s session documentation, each session is assigned a unique identifier that’s used in a cookie. With sessions, you can set data attributes in one view which can then be accessed in another view like this:
```
def view1(request):
request.session[‘name’] = ‘John’
def view2(request):
name = request.session.get(‘name’, ‘Default Value’)
```
1. Django Cookies: Django also allows a web application to set cookies. The `set_cookie` method is used to set a cookie, and `COOKIES` to retrieve a cookie. You can set cookies in one view and get them in another view like this:
```
def view1(request):
response = HttpResponse(“Setting Cookies”)
response.set_cookie(‘name’, ‘John’)
return response
def view2(request):
name = request.COOKIES.get(‘name’, ‘Default Value’)
return HttpResponse(name)
```
Overall, transferring data between views using sessions or cookies is a straightforward task in Django that can be helpful in maintaining state or user-specific data across views.
Sources:
- Django official documentation: Views, https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.2/topics/http/views/
- Django official documentation: Cookies, https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.2/topics/http/cookies/
- Django official documentation: Sessions, https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.2/topics/http/sessions/
