Form handling with class-based viewsLink to this heading
Form processing generally has 3 paths:
Initial GET (blank or prepopulated form)
POST with invalid data (typically redisplay form with errors)
POST with valid data (process the data and typically redirect)
Implementing this yourself often results in a lot of repeated boilerplate code (see Using a form in a view). To help avoid this, Django provides a collection of generic class-based views for form processing.
Basic formsLink to this heading
Given a simple contact form:
forms.pyfrom django import forms
class ContactForm(forms.Form):
name = forms.CharField()
message = forms.CharField(widget=forms.Textarea)
def send_email(self):
# send email using the self.cleaned_data dictionary
pass
The view can be constructed using a FormView:
views.pyfrom myapp.forms import ContactForm
from django.views.generic.edit import FormView
class ContactView(FormView):
template_name = 'contact.html'
form_class = ContactForm
success_url = '/thanks/'
def form_valid(self, form):
# This method is called when valid form data has been POSTed.
# It should return an HttpResponse.
form.send_email()
return super(ContactView, self).form_valid(form)
Notatki:
FormView inherits
TemplateResponseMixinsotemplate_namecan be used here.The default implementation for
form_valid()simply redirects to thesuccess_url.
Model formsLink to this heading
Generic views really shine when working with models. These generic
views will automatically create a ModelForm, so long as
they can work out which model class to use:
If the
modelattribute is given, that model class will be used.If
get_object()returns an object, the class of that object will be used.If a
querysetis given, the model for that queryset will be used.
Model form views provide a
form_valid() implementation
that saves the model automatically. You can override this if you have any
special requirements; see below for examples.
You don’t even need to provide a success_url for
CreateView or
UpdateView - they will use
get_absolute_url() on the model object if available.
If you want to use a custom ModelForm (for instance to
add extra validation) simply set
form_class on your view.
First we need to add get_absolute_url() to our
Author class:
models.pyfrom django.urls import reverse
from django.db import models
class Author(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=200)
def get_absolute_url(self):
return reverse('author-detail', kwargs={'pk': self.pk})
Then we can use CreateView and friends to do the actual
work. Notice how we’re just configuring the generic class-based views
here; we don’t have to write any logic ourselves:
views.pyfrom django.views.generic.edit import CreateView, UpdateView, DeleteView
from django.urls import reverse_lazy
from myapp.models import Author
class AuthorCreate(CreateView):
model = Author
fields = ['name']
class AuthorUpdate(UpdateView):
model = Author
fields = ['name']
class AuthorDelete(DeleteView):
model = Author
success_url = reverse_lazy('author-list')
The fields attribute works the same way as the fields attribute on the
inner Meta class on ModelForm. Unless you define the
form class in another way, the attribute is required and the view will raise
an ImproperlyConfigured exception if it’s not.
If you specify both the fields
and form_class attributes, an
ImproperlyConfigured exception will be raised.
Finally, we hook these new views into the URLconf:
urls.pyfrom django.conf.urls import url
from myapp.views import AuthorCreate, AuthorUpdate, AuthorDelete
urlpatterns = [
# ...
url(r'author/add/$', AuthorCreate.as_view(), name='author-add'),
url(r'author/(?P<pk>[0-9]+)/$', AuthorUpdate.as_view(), name='author-update'),
url(r'author/(?P<pk>[0-9]+)/delete/$', AuthorDelete.as_view(), name='author-delete'),
]
Models and request.userLink to this heading
To track the user that created an object using a CreateView,
you can use a custom ModelForm to do this. First, add
the foreign key relation to the model:
models.pyfrom django.contrib.auth.models import User
from django.db import models
class Author(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=200)
created_by = models.ForeignKey(User, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
# ...
In the view, ensure that you don’t include created_by in the list of fields
to edit, and override
form_valid() to add the user:
views.pyfrom django.views.generic.edit import CreateView
from myapp.models import Author
class AuthorCreate(CreateView):
model = Author
fields = ['name']
def form_valid(self, form):
form.instance.created_by = self.request.user
return super(AuthorCreate, self).form_valid(form)
Note that you’ll need to decorate this
view using
login_required(), or
alternatively handle unauthorized users in the
form_valid().
AJAX exampleLink to this heading
Here is a simple example showing how you might go about implementing a form that works for AJAX requests as well as «normal» form POSTs:
from django.http import JsonResponse
from django.views.generic.edit import CreateView
from myapp.models import Author
class AjaxableResponseMixin(object):
"""
Mixin to add AJAX support to a form.
Must be used with an object-based FormView (e.g. CreateView)
"""
def form_invalid(self, form):
response = super(AjaxableResponseMixin, self).form_invalid(form)
if self.request.is_ajax():
return JsonResponse(form.errors, status=400)
else:
return response
def form_valid(self, form):
# We make sure to call the parent's form_valid() method because
# it might do some processing (in the case of CreateView, it will
# call form.save() for example).
response = super(AjaxableResponseMixin, self).form_valid(form)
if self.request.is_ajax():
data = {
'pk': self.object.pk,
}
return JsonResponse(data)
else:
return response
class AuthorCreate(AjaxableResponseMixin, CreateView):
model = Author
fields = ['name']