Server side templates: how to implement partial updates?

[pwtail]

Hi! My question is about regular django app with templates. Suppose we are using templates mostly, no API.

Suppose we have a view that corresponds to a template that has 5 components. 2 components have figured out their data has been invalidated and they need an update. What do they do? Access their corresponding view? In that case, the view will render all 5 components, where we need only two of them.

How do you solve that problem?

[David-Guillot]

Hi @pwtail ,

There are multiple solutions for that:

• My favorite is to use one of the htmx request headers, like Hx-Trigger or Hx-Target, that are automatically set by htmx when sending a request according to your hx-trigger and hx-target attributes, and that can be parsed by your Django view (even more easily with django-htmx) in order to decide which template to render
• Another one is to render the whole page every time and select the relevant fragment on client-side with hx-select. This sounds suboptimal but sometimes it helps, especially if splitting your Django templates requires a big amount of work
• Yet another approach is to use distinct URLs for each component ; this might be a little more complicated to setup on HTML side but it can help splitting your Django views...

Hope this helps,

[pwtail]

Thank you, I think, hx-select is closer to what I need