CommonMiddleware URL rewriting discards POST data

[adrian@…]

The CommonMiddleware URL rewriting discards any POST data when it is triggered.

This code in django/middleware/common.py needs to be fixed to pass along any possible POST data with the redirect.

        if new_url != old_url:
            # Redirect
            newurl = "%s://%s%s" % (os.environ.get('HTTPS') == 'on' and 'https' or 'http', new_url[0], new_url[1])
            if request.GET:
                newurl += '?' + urlencode(request.GET)
            return httpwrappers.HttpResponseRedirect(newurl)

But I don't know how to fix it :(

[Jacob]

This isn't a Django problem; it's a problem with HTTP itself -- there's no way to pass POST data long with a redirect. Te solution is simply to make sure your forms submit to valid URLs.

[adrian@…]

I would suggest raising an exception or redirecting to 404 when this code gets called with POST data. I had a form submit that was triggering the url rewriting and it was painful tracking down exactly why my view code was receiving a GET instead of a POST. My url matching scheme allowed leaving off the trailing slash (I think "/test/update" looks nicer than "/test/update/"), so from the django code point of view, it was still a valid url submission. If the url rewriting middleware wasn't present, the POST would have been successful. Maybe settings.APPEND_SLASH should be disabled by default (at least for POSTs)? I doubt I'll be the only user who runs into this...

Or is "/test/update" just a completely invalid URL and I should have known this?
Also, doesn't apache's mod_rewrite have a way to do redirects that preserves POST data?

[garthk@…]

500 strikes me as more appropriate than 404.

[Adrian Holovaty]

The answer is: "Don't POST to a redirect."