Django: Search via GET request, POST request or in the URL?

Question

I am implementing a search form in Django. I can do a POST or a GET request. Each has their use-cases (POST request, if I want to change data on the server, GET request, if I just want to get data from the server).

• Via POST request (the search keywords are not visiable in the URL, but rather in a dict in request.POST); cons: I cannot bookmark the search
• via GET request (the search keywords are visible in the URL, for intance localhost:8000/books/?author=schultz); cons(?): the part ?author=schultz cannot be processed by the URL handler (see [2] below). I need to read the data from request.GET.get("author", None) in my view function.
• or directly in the URL like so: localhost:8000/books/search/author/schultz ?

The author in [1] says, that Django's preferred way to handle a URL is not via GET (like so: /category_check_view/?item_id=2, but rather like so /category_check_view/2)

If I would like to implement search like this: localhost:8000/books/author/schultz, then I would have to process a GET request, read the params ?author=schultz via request.GET.get("author", None) and in my view do a redirect from this URL localhost:8000/books (in which I have a form and a GET request) to this localhost:8000/books/author/schultz.

Does this approach make sense? Or am I overcomplicating things? Just leave it at a GET request to implement my search form?

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[1] Yuval Adam says in this post that

GET params are not processed by the URL handler, but rather passed directly to the GET param dict accessible in a view at request.GET.

The Django (i.e. preferred) way to do handle URLs is the first one.

[2] Django docs: What the URLconf searches against

Answer 1

First things first, GET is for reading data and POST is for creating. Since search is a form of reading data, you will use GET!

Which takes us to the matter of the urls. There are as you mention 2 distinct ways to pass parameters via a url in Django:

1. Parameters as part of url:

   Your url regex must look like this:
   

   url(r'^books/author/(?P<author>\w+)/$', 
       'yourviewname', 
       name='author_search'
   )
   

   Your URLs will have the shape: /books/author/author_name_here

2. GET Parameters:

   Your url regex can look like this:

   url(r'^books/$', 
       'yourviewname', 
       name='book_search'
   )
   

   Your URLs will have the shape: /books/?author=author_name_here&other=other_param

It is a matter of choice mostly on what you want to use. To quote a great answer:

Don't obsess over the beauty of your URIs, they are a tool not a piece of art.
- @Quentin -

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For a short implementation example of both the above mentioned ways, take a look at this link

Answer 2

Also usable is:

from django.urls import path

import <your_view> from views.py

path('news/<str:author>/', <your_view>.as_view())