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

You may also want to take a look at this page. Because Django provides some protection against cross-site request forgeries (CSRF), it requires some special AJAX setup. I've included the AJAX setup below:

$(document).ajaxSend(function(event, xhr, settings) {
    function getCookie(name) {
    var cookieValue = null;
    if (document.cookie && document.cookie != '') {
        var cookies = document.cookie.split(';');
        for (var i = 0; i < cookies.length; i++) {
        var cookie = jQuery.trim(cookies[i]);
        // Does this cookie string begin with the name we want?
        if (cookie.substring(0, name.length + 1) == (name + '=')) {
            cookieValue = decodeURIComponent(cookie.substring(name.length + 1));
            break;
        }
        }
    }
    return cookieValue;
    }
    function sameOrigin(url) {
    // url could be relative or scheme relative or absolute
    var host = document.location.host; // host + port
    var protocol = document.location.protocol;
    var sr_origin = '//' + host;
    var origin = protocol + sr_origin;
    // Allow absolute or scheme relative URLs to same origin
    return (url == origin || url.slice(0, origin.length + 1) == origin + '/') ||
        (url == sr_origin || url.slice(0, sr_origin.length + 1) == sr_origin + '/') ||
        // or any other URL that isn't scheme relative or absolute i.e relative.
        !(/^(\/\/|http:|https:).*/.test(url));
    }
    function safeMethod(method) {
    return (/^(GET|HEAD|OPTIONS|TRACE)$/.test(method));
    }

    if (!safeMethod(settings.type) && sameOrigin(settings.url)) {
    xhr.setRequestHeader("X-CSRFToken", getCookie('csrftoken'));
    }
});

Answer 2

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.