Ajax with JQuery on the Django Dev Server

I am putting together an Ajax request with JQuery (1.5) on a Django (1.2.5) site. I am working on the Dev Server currently because I plan on doing demonstrations before a full production roll out.

The javascript code in the template:

function postTest()
{
        $.post("/get_elections", { csrfmiddlewaretoken: $('input[name=csrfmiddlewaretoken]').val() }, alertResult);

}

function alertResult(result)
{
    alert(result);
}

How it's called:

<a href="" onclick='postTest()'>Link</a>
{% csrf_token %}

The Ajax view:

def get_selections(request):
if request.is_ajax():
    if request.method == 'GET':
        message = "This is an XHR GET request"
    elif request.method == 'POST':
        message = "This is an XHR POST request"
        # Here we can access the POST data
        print request.POST
else:
    message = "No XHR"
    return HttpResponse(message)

The Index View:

def index(request):
    polylist = [] 
    return render_to_response('test.html', {'polylist': polylist},context_instance=RequestContext(request))

The URLConf:

(r'^gi_prototype/', 'world.views.index'),
(r'^get_selections$', 'world.views.get_selections')

Relevant settings:

APPEND_SLASH = 'false'

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware',
)

When I click on "Link" in the page, the page reloads and an exception is thrown. The exception, both in Firebug and in Firefox Error Console:

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80040111 >(NS_ERROR_NOT_AVAILABLE) [nsIXMLHttpRequest.getAllResponseHeaders]" nsresult: "0x80040111 >(NS_ERROR_NOT_AVAILABLE)" location: "JS frame :: http://localhost:8000/site_media/jquery-1.5.js :: anonymous :: line 7207" data: no]

The Django Dev Server provides this output (token replaced with question marks by me):

<QueryDict: {u'csrfmiddlewaretoken': [u'??????????????????????????????']}>
[22/Feb/2011 16:31:23] "POST /get_selections HTTP/1.1" 200 27
[22/Feb/2011 16:31:23] "GET /gi_prototype/ HTTP/1.1" 200 970

After several hours of searching, I have begun to think this is simply a limitation of the Django Dev Server, but that seems foolish. Any other suggestions would be very helpful. Thanks in advance.

So I discovered the answer after many long hours of research, and many would do well to learn from my pain.

The problem lay here:

<a href="" onclick='postTest()'>Link</a>

XMLHttpRequests, no matter what their wrapper, cannot be initiated through an onclick in a link tag with an href. I merely changed the code to this:

<form><input type='button' value='Link' onclick='postTest()'/></form>

And it worked perfectly. No server problem. No AJAX errors. Just a matter of using the correct markup.

Heed the warnings of my tale of woe, lest ye suffer my same fate!