Jquery has a funny way of handling 302 redirects during AJAX calls. These frequently come up when I need to redirect a user to a login page. Here’s how I’m handling it with Django.

The underlying problem we experience with redirects in Jquery is that the redirects are followed. So instead of getting a status code of HTTP/1.1 302 Found, we get HTTP/1.1 200 OK. So one way to get around this is to return a made up status code. This is easily accomplished with a middleware in django.

from django.http import HttpResponseRedirect

class AjaxRedirect(object):
    def process_response(self, request, response):
        if request.is_ajax():
            if type(response) == HttpResponseRedirect:
                response.status_code = 278
        return response

Make sure to add the new middleware to settings.py.

'apps.main.middleware.AjaxRedirect'

And the final piece of the puzzle is to add a global AJAX complete handler, that checks for the new status code, redirects the page to the Location header in the HTTP response, and replace the next query variable. The last part is important because the login_required decorator automatically sets the next query variable to the HTTP Referrer, which in this case would be the URL of the AJAX call. So we want to replace it with the page we’re currently on.

$(document).ready(function() {
    $('body').ajaxComplete(function(e, xhr, settings) {
        if (xhr.status == 278) {
            window.location.href = xhr.getResponseHeader("Location").replace(/\?.*$/, "?next="+window.location.pathname);
        }
    });
});

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