[Django]-Ajax views with django

This article seems to be quite a good tutorial on how to work with both ajax and regular requests. The request object has a method is_ajax() which will look for HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH: XMLHttpRequest. This will of course depend on these values being set correctly by the javascript sending the request.

From the article:

from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.core import serializers
from django.shortcuts import render_to_response
from your_app.models import ExampleModel

def xhr_test(request, format):
    obj = ExampleModel.objects.all()
    if request.is_ajax():
        data = serializers.serialize('json', obj)
        return HttpResponse(data,'json')
    else:
        return render_to_response('template.html', {'obj':obj}, context=...)

Or, you could use django-piston which is a RESTful framework for Django. I use this module in my project. You can define resources (sort of like views), and depending on either the mime-type or format passed to your url, it will emit either html, xml, or json. This will probably be the best way to go if every single view (or a large majority) need to be returned in different formats.