Decorator to handle requests beautifully

Some of us might think that checking whether a request is XHR or not every time kills code readability. To solve this, we have an easy solution. We can just write a simple decorator that will handle this redundant code for us.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we will be writing a decorator. For some of the beginners in Python, this might seem like alien territory. In this case, read http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0318/ for a better understanding of decorators.

How to do it…

The following is the decorator method that we have written for this recipe:

from functools import wraps

def template_or_json(template=None):
    """"Return a dict from your view and this will either
    pass it to a template or render json. Use like:
 
    @template_or_json('template.html')
    """
    def decorated(f):
        @wraps(f)
        def decorated_fn(*args, **kwargs):
            ctx = f(*args, **kwargs)
            if request.is_xhr or not template:
              ...