How do I return JSON without using a template in Django?

Question

This is related to this question: Django return json and html depending on client python

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I have a command line Python API for a Django app. When I access the a

Answer 1

Here's an example I needed for conditionally rendering json or html depending on the Request's Accept header

# myapp/views.py
from django.core import serializers                                                                                
from django.http import HttpResponse                                                                                  
from django.shortcuts import render                                                                                   
from .models import Event

def event_index(request):                                                                                             
    event_list = Event.objects.all()                                                                                  
    if request.META['HTTP_ACCEPT'] == 'application/json':                                                             
        response = serializers.serialize('json', event_list)                                                          
        return HttpResponse(response, content_type='application/json')                                                
    else:                                                                                                             
        context = {'event_list': event_list}                                                                          
        return render(request, 'polls/event_list.html', context)

you can test this with curl or httpie

$ http localhost:8000/event/
$ http localhost:8000/event/ Accept:application/json

note I opted not to use JsonReponse as that would reserialize the model unnecessarily.