Opened 8 months ago

Closed 8 months ago

#35403 closed Uncategorized (invalid)

URL path with optional parameter

Reported by: Patrick Hintermayer Owned by: nobody
Component: Uncategorized Version: 5.0
Severity: Normal Keywords: url
Cc: Triage Stage: Unreviewed
Has patch: no Needs documentation: no
Needs tests: no Patch needs improvement: no
Easy pickings: no UI/UX: no

Description

I sometimes have a class based view which has a GET and a POST method, for example a ListView which shows some objects with a POST form to create something out of it.

In the documentation (​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.0/topics/http/urls/) I did not find a simple way of doing that. Asking GitHub Copilot suggested me adding a question mark at the end to mark a parameter as optional which does not work.

I found myself 2 solutions:

  1. using regex which looks cumbersome just for marking something as optional:

    Code highlighting: 

    re_path(
      r"^activate/(?P<activation_token>[^/]+)?$",
      views.UserActivationView.as_view(),
      name="user_activation",
  )


  1. using 2 paths: one without a parameter and one with a parameter:

    Code highlighting: 

    path(
      "activate/",
      views.UserActivationView.as_view(),
      name="user_activation",
  ),
  path(
      "activate/<str:activation_token>/",
      views.UserActivationView.as_view(),
      name="user_activation",
  )


For this ticket, I want to suggest a) improve the documentation with a simple example how to do that and/or b) can this be simplified in django by adding for example a question mark at the end like "/<int:some_id?>/" or "/<int?:some_id>/":

Code highlighting: 

path(
      "activate/<str:activation_token?>/",
      views.UserActivationView.as_view(),
      name="user_activation",
  )

Change History (1)

comment:1 by Sarah Boyce, 8 months ago

Resolution: → invalid
Status: new → closed

Hi Patrick 👋 I think this ticket is a bit of a mix of a support request, new feature request, and docs update request.

With support requests (how do I best achieve X with Django), I recommend asking in the ​forum because you will have many more people who can help answer.

I think I would have either gone for solution 2 using a default for activation_token (a bit like ​what is documented here) or used a query string like activate/?token=some-activation-token and then I can access token in the ​QueryDict (​example involving pagination).
I believe we have this functionality already and so something like "/<int:some_id?>/" would not be required.

Before we can discuss a docs update, you need to know what you would have wanted to see. So I would encourage that you discuss this topic on the ​forum, agree on an approach, and then decide if the docs are clear enough or if there is an enhancement available.

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