by Kunal Sir
Django Forms
Django forms are an advanced set of HTML forms that can be created using python and
support all features of HTML forms in a pythonic way. This post revolves around how to create a
basic form using various Form Fields and attributes. Creating a form in Django is completely
similar to creating a model, one needs to specify what fields would exist in the form and of what
type. For example, to input, a registration form one might need First Name (CharField), Roll
Number (IntegerField), and so on.
Types of Forms
Raw HTML Form
Django Form class
Django ModelForm
1.Raw HTML Form
In Django, you can create HTML forms in a variety of ways, including using raw HTML
in your templates or by using Django's form handling and rendering capabilities. To create a
form using raw HTML in a Django template, follow these steps:
Step 1: Create a Django App
If you haven't already, create a Django app using the command line:
python manage.py startapp myapp
Step 2: Register the application
Register app into the INSTALLED_APPS list inside settings.py file.
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Step 3: Create a Django Template:
Create or open an existing Django template directory (.html file) where you want to
include the raw HTML form.
action: This attribute specifies where the form data should be sent when submitted. Replace
"/submit-form" with the URL or path where your form data should be processed.
method: This attribute specifies the HTTP method to be used when submitting the form. POST
is commonly used to send data securely.
Inside the <form> tags, you can add various input fields using the <input> element:
Explanation:
<label>: Provides a label for an input field. The for attribute links the label to its
corresponding input field.
<input>: Creates different types of input fields (text, email, textarea, submit, etc.). Each
has different attributes like type, id, and name.
<input type="submit">: Creates a submit button to send the form data.
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Closing the Form, Always ensure to properly close the form tag:</form>
Once the form is created, you can test it by opening the HTML file in a web browser. Fill in the
form fields and submit it. The form data will be sent to the specified action URL using the
specified method.
Note:
Use appropriate id and name attributes for each input field.
Always ensure proper security measures when handling form submissions to prevent
exploits like SQL injection or cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.
Remember to include {% csrf_token %} inside the <form> tag when using the POST
method to prevent CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) attacks.
In a Django view, you can access this data using request.GET for GET requests or
request.POST for POST requests to retrieve the values by their respective name
attributes specified in the form.
Methods:
GET Method:
Sends data in the URL's query string.
Parameters are visible in the URL.
Limited data can be sent (URL has a length limit).
Can be bookmarked and cached.
Generally used for retrieving data from the server.
Not secure for sensitive information as data is visible in the URL.
Example:
<form method="GET">
<input type="text" name="username">
<input type="submit" value="Submit">
</form>
If submitted, the URL might look like: process.php?username=enteredName.
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POST Method:
Sends data in the body of the HTTP request.
Parameters are not visible in the URL.
Can send larger amounts of data compared to GET.
Not bookmarked or cached (by default).
More secure for sensitive information as data is not visible in the URL.
Example:
<form method="POST">
<input type="text" name="username">
<input type="submit" value="Submit">
</form>
Step 4: Create a View
In your app's views.py, create a view function to render the form:
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by Kunal Sir
Step 5: Configure URLs
In your project's urls.py, map the URL to the view:
Step 6: Run your Django development server:
python manage.py runserver
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by Kunal Sir
Visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/myform/ in your browser to access the form and test its
functionality.
Step 7: Data Store into DataBase
For that we should have model class defined in models.py Which has same fields as we
are taking from user.
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Command:
Py manage.py makemigrations
Py manage.py migrate
Step 8: Insert ORM query in views.py file
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Django Form Class:
When one creates a Form class, the most important part is defining the fields of the
form.
Forms are basically used for taking input from the user in some manner and using that
information for logical operations on databases. For example, Registering a user by taking input
as his name, email, password, etc.
Creating a form in Django is completely similar to creating a model, one needs to specify what
fields would exist in the form and of what type. For example, to input, a registration form one
might need First Name (CharField), Roll Number (IntegerField), and so on.
Step 1: Create forms.py file in app directory.
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Step 2: After creating forms.py file in our application folder with our required fields.
UserForm is a form class that inherits from Form class and imported from forms.py.
Username, password are form fields defined as class attributes.( each field would be
mapped as an input field in HTML)
forms.CharField, forms.EmailField, and forms.Textarea are examples of field types
provided by Django. They allow you to specify the type of data expected and provide
validation rules.
The arguments that are common to most fields are listed below (these have sensible
default values):
o required: If True, the field may not be left blank or given a None value. Fields are
required by default, so you would set required=False to allow blank values in the
form.
o label: The label to use when rendering the field in HTML. If a label is not
specified, Django will create one from the field name by capitalizing the first letter
and replacing underscores with spaces (e.g. Renewal date).
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o label_suffix: By default, a colon is displayed after the label (e.g. Renewal date:).
This argument allows you to specify a different suffix containing other
character(s).
o initial: The initial value for the field when the form is displayed.
o widget: The display widget to use.
o help_text (as seen in the example above): Additional text that can be displayed
in forms to explain how to use the field.
o error_messages: A list of error messages for the field. You can override these
with your own messages if needed.
o validators: A list of functions that will be called on the field when it is validated.
o localize: Enables the localization of form data input (see link for more
information).
o disabled: The field is displayed but its value cannot be edited if this is True. The
default is False.
Once you've defined your form class, you can use it in your views to render the form in a
template, process submitted data, validate it, and perform any necessary actions.
Step 3: Define View
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On a GET request, an instance of MyForm is created and passed to the template for
rendering.
On a POST request, the form is instantiated with the data from the request.
The is_valid() method is used to perform validation for each field of the form, it is defined
in Django Form class. It returns True if data is valid and place all data into a
form.cleaned_data attribute and perform further actions, such as saving to a database.
Pass formclass object into the context.
{“form”: formclass_nm}
Step 4: Define App_url
PROJECT_NMAPP_NMurls.py
Step 5: Render Django Forms using Template
Django form fields have several built-in methods to ease the work of the developer but
sometimes one needs to implement things manually for customizing User Interface(UI). A form
comes with 3 in-built methods that can be used to render Django form fields.
{{ form.as_table }} will render them as table cells wrapped in <tr> tags
{{ form.as_p }} will render them wrapped in <p> tags
{{ form.as_ul }} will render them wrapped in <li> tags
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{% csrf_token %} is used for security reasons to prevent Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
attacks. {{ form.as_p }} will render the form fields as paragraph elements (<p>).
Step 6: Run development server
Py manage.py runserver
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by Kunal Sir
Django Model Form:
It is a class which is used to create an HTML form by using the Model. It is an efficient
way to create a form without writing HTML code.
Django automatically does it for us to reduce the application development time.
Step 1: Create a model
Create Model that contains fields name and other metadata. It can be used to create a
table in database and dynamic HTML form.
// model.py
This file contains a class that inherits ModelForm and mention the model name for which HTML
form is created.
Step 2: Migrate
Py manage.py makemigrations
Py manage.py migrate
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Step 3: Create Forms.py file
// forms.py
UserModelForm is a form class is inherited from ModelForm.
The Meta class is used to change the behavior of the ModelForm. Within it, specify the
model your fields come from and the fields you want to use from that model.( to specify
Model information and required fields.)
field declarations if we are performing any custom validations.If we are not defining any
custom validations then here we are not required to specify any field.
Case 1: All Fields
class Meta:
# we have to specify Model class name and requied fields
model=Student
fields='__all__'
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Case 2: Instead of all fields if we want only selected fields, then we have to specify as
follows
class Meta:
model=Student
fileds=('field1','field2','field3') #In the form only 3 fields will be considered.If Model class
contains huge number of fields and we required to consider very less number of fields in the
form then we should use this approach.
Case 3:Instead of all fields if we want to exclude certain fields, then we have to specify
as follows:
class Meta:
model=Student
exclude=['field1', 'field2'] #In the form all fields will be considered except field1 and field2.If
the Model class contains huge number of fields and if we want to exclude very few fields then
we have to use this approach
Step 4: Define views
//views.py
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by Kunal Sir
Step 5: Define urls
App_urls
Project_urls
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Step 6: Define Template
And finally, create a index.html file that contains the following code.
Step 7: Run Server
python manage.py runserver
After that access the template by localhost:8000/index URL, and it will display the following
output to the browser.
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