Testing AJAX Requests in Django Posted on May 08, 2009 by Dave Fowler

Django has a really handy function on the request object that will determine if the request was an AJAX request (an XMLHttpRequest).

request.is_ajax()

It simply checks whether the HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH header is equal to 'XMLHttpRequest', a standard that's supported by most javascript libraries. You can read more about it and see the list of supporting frameworks here.

It'd be great if the Django client had a simple client.ajax request in addition to its client.post and client.get requests, but alas it doesn't. The tests can still be done however by changing the HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH header when sending your test requests.

>>> from django.test.client import Client
>>> client = Client()
>>> client.post("http://example.com", {"foo": "bar"}, **{'HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH': 'XMLHttpRequest'})

From there its fairly straight forward to create your own .ajax wrapper if you'd like.

Now you have no excuse for not having complete tests for all of your XMLHttpRequests :).