============================ Request and response objects ============================ .. module:: django.http :synopsis: Classes dealing with HTTP requests and responses. Quick overview ============== Django uses request and response objects to pass state through the system. When a page is requested, Django creates an :class:`HttpRequest` object that contains metadata about the request. Then Django loads the appropriate view, passing the :class:`HttpRequest` as the first argument to the view function. Each view is responsible for returning an :class:`HttpResponse` object. This document explains the APIs for :class:`HttpRequest` and :class:`HttpResponse` objects, which are defined in the :mod:`django.http` module. HttpRequest objects =================== .. class:: HttpRequest .. _httprequest-attributes: Attributes ---------- All attributes should be considered read-only, unless stated otherwise below. ``session`` is a notable exception. .. attribute:: HttpRequest.body .. versionchanged:: 1.4 Before Django 1.4, ``HttpRequest.body`` was named ``HttpRequest.raw_post_data``. The raw HTTP request body as a byte string. This is useful for processing data in different ways than conventional HTML forms: binary images, XML payload etc. For processing conventional form data, use ``HttpRequest.POST``. You can also read from an HttpRequest using a file-like interface. See :meth:`HttpRequest.read()`. .. attribute:: HttpRequest.path A string representing the full path to the requested page, not including the domain. Example: ``"/music/bands/the_beatles/"`` .. attribute:: HttpRequest.path_info Under some Web server configurations, the portion of the URL after the host name is split up into a script prefix portion and a path info portion. The ``path_info`` attribute always contains the path info portion of the path, no matter what Web server is being used. Using this instead of attr:`~HttpRequest.path` can make your code much easier to move between test and deployment servers. For example, if the ``WSGIScriptAlias`` for your application is set to ``"/minfo"``, then ``path`` might be ``"/minfo/music/bands/the_beatles/"`` and ``path_info`` would be ``"/music/bands/the_beatles/"``. .. attribute:: HttpRequest.method A string representing the HTTP method used in the request. This is guaranteed to be uppercase. Example:: if request.method == 'GET': do_something() elif request.method == 'POST': do_something_else() .. attribute:: HttpRequest.encoding A string representing the current encoding used to decode form submission data (or ``None``, which means the :setting:`DEFAULT_CHARSET` setting is used). You can write to this attribute to change the encoding used when accessing the form data. Any subsequent attribute accesses (such as reading from ``GET`` or ``POST``) will use the new ``encoding`` value. Useful if you know the form data is not in the :setting:`DEFAULT_CHARSET` encoding. .. attribute:: HttpRequest.GET A dictionary-like object containing all given HTTP GET parameters. See the :class:`QueryDict` documentation below. .. attribute:: HttpRequest.POST A dictionary-like object containing all given HTTP POST parameters. See the :class:`QueryDict` documentation below. It's possible that a request can come in via POST with an empty ``POST`` dictionary -- if, say, a form is requested via the POST HTTP method but does not include form data. Therefore, you shouldn't use ``if request.POST`` to check for use of the POST method; instead, use ``if request.method == "POST"`` (see above). Note: ``POST`` does *not* include file-upload information. See ``FILES``. .. attribute:: HttpRequest.REQUEST For convenience, a dictionary-like object that searches ``POST`` first, then ``GET``. Inspired by PHP's ``$_REQUEST``. For example, if ``GET = {"name": "john"}`` and ``POST = {"age": '34'}``, ``REQUEST["name"]`` would be ``"john"``, and ``REQUEST["age"]`` would be ``"34"``. It's strongly suggested that you use ``GET`` and ``POST`` instead of ``REQUEST``, because the former are more explicit. .. attribute:: HttpRequest.COOKIES A standard Python dictionary containing all cookies. Keys and values are strings. .. attribute:: HttpRequest.FILES A dictionary-like object containing all uploaded files. Each key in ``FILES`` is the ``name`` from the ````. Each value in ``FILES`` is an :class:`UploadedFile` as described below. See :doc:`/topics/files` for more information. Note that ``FILES`` will only contain data if the request method was POST and the ``