Basically when you are building a simple page that displays a list of items that contain a few filters you might want to maintain them while navigating, for example while browser through the pages of results.
Nowadays many of this kind of pages are rendered client-side using libraries such as vue and react, so this doesn’t pose much of a problem since the state is easily managed and requests are generated according to that state.
But what if you are building a simple page/website using traditional server-side rendered pages (that for many purposes is totally appropriate)? Generating the pagination this way while maintaining the current selected filters (and other query params) might give you more work and trouble than it should.
So today I’m going to present you a quick solution in the form of a template tag that can help you easily handle that situation. With a quick search on the Internet you will almost for sure find the following answer:
@register.simple_tag
def url_replace(request, field, value):
dict_ = request.GET.copy()
dict_[field] = value
return dict_.urlencode()
Which is great and work for almost scenario that comes to mind, but I think it can be improved a little bit, so like one of lower ranked answers suggests, we can change it to handle more than one query parameter while maintaining the others:
@register.simple_tag(takes_context=True)
def updated_params(context, **kwargs):
dict_ = context['request'].GET.copy()
for k, v in kwargs.items():
dict_[k] = v
return dict_.urlencode()
As you can see, with takes_context we no longer have to repeatedly pass the request object to the template tag and we can give it any number of parameters.
The main difference for the suggestion on “Stack Overflow” it that this version allows for repeating query params, because we don’t convert the QueryDict to a dict. Now you just need to use it in your templates like this:
https://example.ovalerio.net?{% updated_params page=2 something='else' %}
