Is there any better way to do like history.back() in django backend?

Question

In Django, I have "form view(GET)" and "action view(POST)"

If there is a validation error or any other error in action view,
I want browser to go back to the previous form page with the input data wrote by the user remains.

I tried:
At first, I used return redirect(request.META.get('HTTP_REFERER')).
This code goes back to the previous page well, but all the input fields became empty.

And now I am using return HttpResponse("<script>history.back();</script>") this code.
This works very well. but It looks weird sending javascript response.

What I expected was like return redirect.back()(with like HTTP 301 or 30X status code)

I was wondering if there is any better way or a proper way like officially provided by Django.

Answer 1

I want browser to go back to the previous form page with the input data wrote by the user remains.

To achieve above goal, you should create a form on django

forms.py

from django import forms


class UserForm(forms.Form):
    your_name = forms.CharField(label="Your name", max_length=100)
    your_surname = forms.CharField(label="Your surname", max_length=100)

views.py

from django.http import HttpResponseRedirect
from django.shortcuts import render

from .forms import UserForm

def get_user_form(request):
 # if this is a POST request we need to process the form data
    if request.method == "POST":
        # create a form instance and populate it with data from the request:
        form = UserForm(request.POST)
        # check whether it's valid:
        if form.is_valid():
            # process the data in form.cleaned_data as required
            # ...
            # redirect to a new URL:
            return HttpResponseRedirect("/thanks/")

    # if a GET (or any other method) we'll create a blank form
    else:
        form = UserForm()

    return render(request, "userform.html", {"form": form})

userform.html

<form action="/user-form" method="post">
    {% csrf_token %}
    {{ form }}
    <input type="submit" value="Submit">
</form>

Notice:

if form.is_valid():
   # rest of the code...

If this check fails, i.e. user-submitted info is invalid, form will be returned to the user with the (invalid) data submitted by the user .

There is return render(request, "name.html", {"form": form}) line an the end.

If the request is Get, i.e user is just requesting the form page, form will be empty.

But if the request is Post and user-submitted data is invalid, prepopulated form is returned.

You can learn more about django forms here