GET request the django way

Question

I am playing with Django and have the following question.

I have a search form in some template:

<form role="search" method="get" action="{% url 'polls:search' %}">
....
<\form>

which, for example, forms the following request:

 http://127.0.0.1:8000/search/?text=dog&year=2017

The corresponding function in the view.py file works well with this request.

At some point in other template i need to make a link which leads to

http://127.0.0.1:8000/search/?text=&year=2017

I do the following:

 <a href="{% url 'polls:search' %}?text=&year=2017">

It looks a little bit ugly and maybe incorrect. Is there another way?

For example, is it possible to form the get request in the Django way:

http://127.0.0.1:8000/search/dog/2017

So in the other template, one can write

 <a href="{% url 'polls:search' %} text='' year=2017">

Answer 1

Semantically, search terms should rather be get parameters. You can write a simple template tag that takes keyword arguments and use a QueryDict to handle the proper url encoding:

# some_installed_app/templatetags/my_tags.py
from django.http import QueryDict
from django import template

register = template.Library()

@register.simple_tag
def querystring(**kwargs):
    d = QueryDict(mutable=True)
    d.update(kwargs)
    return d.urlencode()

And in the template, you can do:

# template.html
{% load my_tags %}
<a href="{% url 'polls:search' %}?{% querystring text='' year=2017 %}">
# http://127.0.0.1:8000/search/?text=&year=2017

It will be able to handle awkward data properly, e.g.:

...{% querystring text='foo bar' %}
# ...text=foo+bar