Django forms and passing data between views/pages

Question

I am creating a web app and the home page is where the user selects their location. The view for the home page template queries my database for a list of locations and populates a drop down list. After the user hits submit, I validate the form data, and if they picked a valid city (ie. it exists in my database), I want to redirect them to another page that displays deals of the day for that city. My question is based on basic view/form design in Django. How can I pass the city onto the next page? Basically I want to do the following:

Home Page -> submit form -> call method to validate form -> form redirects user to another page

Do I have to create a separate validate view/page for validation? Forms take an action parameter, so I'm guessing I would have to set the action to /validate/, which would call my validate_form() method (through the urls.py file), which would then redirect them to the appropriate page.

I just wanted to run my thoughts by someone before I went ahead and implemented it. Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

Why do you want to validate the city? Just redirect to the city and if the city does not exist then the 404 page will be shown.

your template

<form action="{% url 'choose_city' %}" method="POST">
    <select name="city">
    {% for city in cities %}
        <option value="{{ city.id }}">{{ city.name }}</option>
    {% endfor %}
    </select>
    <button>Show deals</button>
</form>

urls.py

url(r'^choose/$', views.choose_city, name='choose_city'),
url(r'^deals/(?P<city_id>\d+)/$', views.deals_by_city, name='deals_by_city'),

views.py

from django.shortcuts import get_object_or_404, redirect, render

def choose_city(request):
    return redirect('deals_by_city', city_id=request.POST['city'])

def deals_by_city(request, city_id):
    city = get_object_or_404(City, pk=city_id)
    deals = Deal.objects.filter(city=city)
    return render(request, 'deals_by_city.html', {'city': city,
                                                  'deals': deals})