What is a more efficient way to pass variables from Template to View in Django?

Question

My question involves passing variables from the template to view in Django.

I know of passing variables in the URL and through a form. The problem I have with the first

Answer 1

There are broadly 3 ways to hold onto this kind of information:

Session (my suggestion for your situation)

Just stuff the data you want into the request.session dictionary; it'll persist per-user, and you can access it easily:

# view1
request.session['name1'] = male_results
request.session['userid1'] = male_pic_userid

# view2 (or elsewhere in view1)
male_results = request.session.get('name1')
male_pic_userid = request.session.get('userid1')

Advantages

• No changes needed to your templates (except removing your now-unnecessary forms).
• Clean URLs
• Persists even through closing and re-opening the browser window
• You don't need to worry about users modifying or even seeing the session data (it's way more secure)

Disadvantages

• As with POST, page content is dictated by the URL and session data — URLs are no longer unique, and users can't share a particular page that relies on session info

Query parameters

Something like /match/?name1=foo1&userid1&name2=bar&userid2=2. You can either add these manually (etc.)