Django says is_ajax is false on a JQuery AJAX request

Question

Context: a chrome browser extension uses JQuery to request a response from a remote django app. Django recognizes that the request is made via AJAX and resp

Answer 1

Going through the jQuery source, it looks like $.ajax() (and therefore $.get(), $.post(), etc) will automatically set the crossDomain option to true if it sees that you're making a cross-domain request, which you are (relevant code here). And in the actual AJAX request, jQuery won't set the HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH header that Django needs for is_ajax() if crossDomain is set (relevant code here).

I think the easiest way to fix this is to explicitly set crossDomain to false:

function xhrconnect() {
    $.ajax({
        url: "http://localhost:8000/xhr_test", 
        success: function(data) {
            document.getElementById('xhrmsg').innerHTML = (data);
        },
        crossDomain: false
    });
}

If that doesn't work, you could try using an AJAX prefilter function to manually set the HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH header on the request.