CSRF token missing or incorrect even though I have {% csrf_token %}

Question

I have been getting this error referring to this method in my views.py file:

def AddNewUser(request):
    a=AMI()
    if(request.method == "POST"):
        print(request.POST)
       # print(request['newUser'])
       # print(request['password'])
    return render_to_response("ac/AddNewUser.html", {})

But my other functions work just fine. It's just this button in my HTML file that doesn't work.

<form name="AddNewUser" action="/ac/AddNewUser" method="post"> {% csrf_token %} <input type="submit" name="addNewUser" id="addNewUser" value="Create User"></form>

As you can see I've got the {% csrf_token %} but it's still not working. I also know some people are having this problem if they don't have MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES in their settings.py but I have that inserted correctly. What could be causing this problem? The only other line in the error says: "The view function uses RequestContext for the template, instead of Context." But I don't know what that could mean.

John C John C · Accepted Answer · 2011-05-07T17:25:17

You have to use a RequestContext object to get the context, then pass the results in to your render_to_response() function. RequestContext adds in a required CSRF token.

from django.template import RequestContext
from django.shortcuts import render_to_response

csrfContext = RequestContext(request)
return render_to_response(some_template, csrfContext)

As a side note, you can also use RequestContext to add contexts/dictionaries intended for the template. For instance, I frequently use:

initialData = {'form': theForm, 'user_status': 'online'}
csrfContext = RequestContext(request, initialData)
return render_to_response(show_template, csrfContext)

As a (brief) explanation of what RequestContext does: most middleware creates something called a context processor, which is simply a function that supplies a context (dictionary) of variables. RequestContext looks for all the available context processors, gets their contexts, and appends them all to a single (giant) context.

CSRF token missing or incorrect even though I have {% csrf_token %}

2 Answers