1. Eclipse with PyDev (part of Aptana now)
2. TextMate with Django Bundle (technically not an IDE but allot of people love it)
3. Netbeans with Django Plugin
4. Wing
5. Komodo with Django Komodo Kit

So I’m sure some of you people out there will say man up… use VIM or Emacs… be a real programmer! To that I say have at it. If that’s your preference then do what works best for you. By all means, leave me a comment and tell my how wrong I am and/or glow about how good your IDE/editor is. Long story short Django is an awesome framework and whatever you choose to work in I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

Basically it takes your url & params and dynamically builds the DOM for the form and then submits it.

Requires that you include prototype.js.

Here is an example link. You just pass the url you wish to submit to and an associative array of the params.

post the request

Here is the js function. Include this in the head of your page.

/*
* Dynamically creates a form based on args and submits it to the given url
* @param {Object} url
* @param {Object} params
*/
function post_from_link(url,params){
   var form = new Element('form', { action: url, method: 'POST' });
   for(param in params){
       var hidden = new Element('input', {type:'hidden', name:param, value:params[param]});
       form.insert(hidden);
   }
   document.body.appendChild(form);
   form.submit();
}

In your js

function loadDialog(){
    var cb = {
      success: showDialog,
      failure: displayError
    };
    Ext.lib.Ajax.formRequest( 'merge_form', '/controller/get_dialog' , cb , null, false, null);
}
function showDialog(response){
   var dlg = new Ext.BasicDialog("example_dialog",{
		        height: 200,
		        width: 300,
		        resizeable: false,
			autoCreate: true,
		        modal: true,
		        draggable:false,
			collapsible:false,
		        shadow: true,
			title:'Hola'
		    });

		    dlg.addKeyListener(27, dlg.hide, dlg);
		    dlg.addButton('Yes', dlg.hide, dlg);
		    dlg.addButton('No', dlg.hide, dlg);
		    dlg.body.dom.innerHTML = response.responseText;
		    dlg.show();
		}
function displayError(response){
   if(response.responseText == null){
	 Ext.MessageBox.alert("Woops!","The requested operation failed.");
   }else{
	Ext.MessageBox.alert("Woops!",response.responseText);
   }
}

In your controller

  def get_dialog
    @msg = "hello world"
    render :partial=>"/dialogs/content"
  end

In your partial

  <%= @msg %>

In your view

<input type="button" onClick="loadDialog();" value="show dialog" />

This first one is a function to get a page number for pagination based on start index and result set size.

  def get_page(_start,_limit)
    start = (_start || 1).to_i
    size = (_limit || 25).to_i
    return ((start/size).to_i)+1
  end

This function returns an age based on birth date thats pulled from a DateTime db col.

  def age(birthdate)
    unless birthdate.nil?
      age = Date.today.year - birthdate.year
      if Date.today.month < birthdate.month ||
      (Date.today.month == birthdate.month && birthdate.day >= Date.today.day)
        age = age - 1
      end
      return age
    else
      return 0
    end
  end

This function takes a string and a length and truncates it while also appending … to the end.

  def ellipses(str,length)
    if str.nil?
      return
    else
      return (str.length > length) ? "#{str[0,length]}..." : str
    end
  end

In this example we see how to merge validation errors for more then one object so they can be displayed with the error_messages_for helper.

if @user.update_attributes(params[:user])
   flash[:notice] = "Account Updated"
else
   flash[:notice] = "Account Updated Failed"
   @user.profile.errors.each do |attribute, error|
      @user.errors.add(attribute, error)
   end
end