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How do you make a url that passes a parameter work in Django?

I'm working on registration logic and I can't seem to make the parameter pass in to work properly. The error I get is a 404 page not found. Previously, I also got a “The view didn't return an HttpResponse object" error. Any help is appreciated.
Here is my url from urls.py:
url(r'^accounts/confirm/(?P<activation_key>\d+)/$', 'mysite.views.confirm', name='confirm'),
This is my views.py:
def confirm(request, activation_key):
if request.user.is_authenticated():
HttpResponseRedirect('/home')
user = Hash.objects.filter(hash_key = activation_key)
if user:
user = Hash.objects.get(hash_key = activation_key)
user_obj = User.objects.get(username= user.username)
user_obj.is_active = True
user_obj.save()
HttpResponseRedirect('/home')
I send the url with a string that looks like:
"Click the link to activate your account http://www.example.com/accounts/confirm/%s" % (obj.username, activation_key)"
So the link looks like this:
http://www.example.com/accounts/confirm/4beo8d98fef1cd336a0f239jf4dc7fbe7bad8849a127d847f

You have two issues here:
Remove the trailing / from your pattern, or make it /? so it will be optional.
/d+ will only match digits, and your link also contains other characters. Try [a-z0-9]+ instead.
Complete pattern:
^accounts/confirm/(?P<activation_key>[a-z0-9]+)$

Remove / from end of your url:
url(r'^accounts/confirm/(?P<activation_key>\d+)$', 'mysite.views.confirm', name='confirm'),
or add / to end of your link:
http://www.example.com/accounts/confirm/4beo8d98fef1cd336a0f239jf4dc7fbe7bad8849a127d847f/

Having trouble catching variables from urls.py with views.py

I am trying to capture 2 slugs/variables from a url, pass them to a view and then use the view to pass them to a template.
The relevant line from my urls.py:
url(r'^docs/(?P<ver>)[-\w]+/(?P<name>)[-\w]+/$', views.sphinxdoc),
My views.py:
from django.shortcuts import render
def sphinxdoc(request, ver, name):
context = {'ver': ver, 'name': name}
return render(request, 'sphinx-documentation.html', context)
I am trying to change the src url of an <iframe> based on the ver and name values like so:
<iframe src="{% static 'docs/'|add:ver|add:'/'|add:name|add:'/_build/html/index.html' %}"></iframe>
When viewing in the browser, I get an error saying 'docs///_build/html/index.html' could not be found. It seems like the template variables 'ver' and 'name' never get set and are therefore rendered as empty strings. How would I allow for these variables to be set from the views.sphinxdoc function?

change urls.py like this:
url(r'^docs/(?P<ver>\w+)/(?P<name>\w+)/$', views.sphinxdoc),
Since the name slug could have "-"'s in it this won't quite work. Instead I used this:
url(r'^docs/(?P<ver>[-\w]+)/(?P<name>[-\w]+)/$, views.sphinxdoc),

I figured it out and thought I would post the solution here for anyone else that might stumble into this problem.
I am not sure why, but when pulling in ver and name as a functional parameter, its variable type was not being set as string. To solve this I just converted the variables to strings like so:
from django.shortcuts import render
def sphinxdoc(request, ver, name):
ver = str(ver)
name = str(name)
return render(request, 'sphinx-documentation.html', {'ver': ver, 'name': name})
This fixed the issue.
Edit: Additionally, you can simplify by doing in-line string conversion...
def sphinxdoc(request, ver, name):
return render(request, 'sphinx-documentation.html', {'ver': str(ver),
'name': str(name)})

Django reverse URL issue

I'm having issues getting the following code (below) to work (there are no errors) . In my template I'm outputting item.get_settings_url but I get nothing. What I'm I doing wrong here?
In my models I have the following model method:
def get_settings_url(self):
return reverse('sms.views.keyword_settings', args=[str(self.keyword)])
urls:
url(r'^keyword/^(?P<keyword>[\.\w-]+)/settings/$', views.keyword_settings, name='keyword_settings')
view:
def keyword_settings(request, keyword):
return render_to_response('keyword_settings.html', context_instance=RequestContext(request))

Your URL contains a named parameter. Hence, you need to pass that name when calling reverse. Also, you should use the name of the URL to make the reverse lookup short and easier to maintain:
return reverse('keyword_settings', kwargs={'keyword': str(self.keyword)})

How do I make my post form handling more flexible

I have written what I hope to be a re-usable Django app, but I have a bit of a conundrum on how to make the post form handling flexible. The simplified version of my view code looks like:
def do_form(request, entity_id, template_name, success_url):
form = MyForm(request.POST or None)
if request.method =='POST':
if form.is_valid():
#do some business logic
return HttpResponseRedirect(finished_url)
return render_to_response(template_name,
{'form': form},
context_instance=RequestContext(request))
I have followed the advice in James Bennets book "Practical Django Projects" and so you can now configure the template and the success url in the url conf, so for example my url conf could look like this:
urlpatterns = patterns('myapp.views',
url(r'^do/(?P<entity_id>\d+)/$',
view = 'do_form',
name = 'do_form_view',
kwargs={'template_name':'form.html',
'success_url':'/finish/'},),
url(r'^finish/$',
view = 'finish',
name = 'finish_view')
)
This is all very well and good but when I have come to use this in my real world application I find myself in a situation that this form sits in the middle of some workflow, and I want the success url to be something like /continue/<workflow_id>/ , and the problem is that you can only have a hardcoded url in the url conf, and the workflow_id will vary every time I hit the do_form code.
Can any one suggest a way to get around this?

You can achieve that by changing the following..
in do_form() in views.py
change the return HttpResponseRedirect to
return HttpResponseRedirect('/continue/%s' %(workflowid))
And in urls.py, you can have
url(r'^continue/(?P<workflowid>\d+)/$',
view = 'continue',
name = 'continue_view')
and for the continue() view in views.py
def continue(request, workflowid=None):
...
This way.. whenever you access the url /continue/ without a number, workflowid will be equal to None. Every other time when you do have a workflowid attached for e.g. like /continue/23/ , then inside your continue() view you can access that id through the variable workflowid.

When you pass a hypothethical "flexible" success_url to a view, that view MUST supply the desired identifier. So if you mismatch the URL and the view, we can't avoid having a "breach of contract" between the two.
Therefore if we are to have flexible URLs, some kind of contract shall have to be enforced, and there will be no loss of generality if we do this through a special syntax for URLs:
'finished_url': '/finish/<workflow_id>/'
Then, of course, the view shall have to instantiate the variable through a string replacement to honor its side of the contract: instead of
return HttpResponseRedirect(finished_url)
you will have
return HttpResponseRedirect(finished_url.replace('<workflow_id>', WorkflowID))
This should keep things reasonably simple.
When reusing code, you will have to keep in mind that <workflow_id> is whatever that app uses to call workflow id, and that's why I use a complicated string such as workflow_id instead of id or maybe $1.
EDIT: I was going to add the code for the next step (intercepting workflow ID in argument of finish), but I see that keithxm23 beat me to the punch :-)

You can do it the same way people have been "overriding" Django's function-based generic views for years: simply wrap the view in another view:
def custom_do_form(request, entity_id, template_name, success_url):
template_name = some_method_to_get_template()
return do_form(request, entity_id, template_name, success_url)

implementation difficulties in some part of views.py file in django cms

My views.py code:
from django.template import Context, loader, RequestContext
from django.http import HttpResponse
from skey import find_root_tags, count, sorting_list
from search.models import Keywords
def front_page(request):
if request.method == 'get' :
str1 = request.getvalue['word']
fo = open("xml.txt","r")
for i in range(count.__len__()):
file = fo.readline()
file = file.rstrip('\n')
find_root_tags(file,str1,i)
list.append((file,count[i]))
sorting_list(list)
for name, count in list:
s = Keywords(file_name=name,frequency_count=count)
s.save()
fo.close()
return HttpResponseRedirect('/results/')
else :
str1 = ''
list = []
template = loader.get_template('search/front_page.html')
c = RequestContext(request)
response = template.render(c)
return HttpResponse(response)
def results(request):
list1 = Keywords.objects.all()
t = loader.get_template('search/results.html')
c = Context({'list1':list1,
})
return HttpResponse(t.render(c))
#this for everyone.
the flow is this:
1) I run my app on the server .
2)It shows me the search page due to the else part of the view "def front_page(request)", now I want to execute the if part of the view "def front_page(request)" because I want to execute my python code written there and the redirected to the view "def results(request)", how can I do that ?
3) what should I mention in "action" of the front_page.html and in urls.py so that I can get back to the same view again. because I could'nt get back to the same view that I want it is repetitively showing me the same search page.Please help.

To enlarge upon the answer posted by #Barnaby....by using action='#' your form will be posted to the same url as the url used in the get request for the form.
Then in your view code, you have logic that says - if the request for this url is a GET request then do the work to configure the form, otherwise, you assume it is a POST and then you can handle the response.
Additionally I would advise that the your view explicitly checks that the request is a POST and if not make the assumption that it is a GET, rather than the other way around (as you have it), this is safer, as GET and POST are not the only request types, and you definitely need to know that you are dealing with a POST request if you want to deal with variables submitted in the POST request.
Hope that helps

Short answer: action="#". This is a HTML trick to post back to the current URL.
The general answer to how to reference a view in a template is to use the url tag. You may also want to consider using Django's forms functionality.