Django Forms
Learn how to manage forms in Django - a comprehensive introduction for beginners
This page explains how to manage and validate a form in Django Framework. We assume the audience has already a Django project up and running. For those that start from nothing, feel free to access the resources mentioned below and come back here once the content is understood:
Topics covered by this tutorial
- Create a new Django app
- Define a new route
- Update the configuration to include the new application
- Code a simple form
- Visualize the form using Django shell
- Integrate the Form into a real page
- Update the controller to check the form is validated
Create a new Application
For this, we will use thestartappDjango subcommand:
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$ python manage.py startapp forms
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Add a simple view in forms -forms/views.py
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# File contents: forms/views.py
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from django.shortcuts import render
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from django.http import HttpResponse
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def index(request):
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return HttpResponse("Hello Django - Forms")
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Define the routing for our new app -forms/urls.py
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from django.urls import path, re_path
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from forms import views
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urlpatterns = [
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# The home page
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path('forms/', views.index, name='home'),
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]
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Update settings to include the new app -config/settings.py
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# File: config/settings.py (partial content)
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...
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INSTALLED_APPS = [
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'django.contrib.admin',
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'django.contrib.auth',
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'django.contrib.contenttypes',
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'django.contrib.sessions',
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'django.contrib.messages',
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'django.contrib.staticfiles',
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'forms' # <-- NEW
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]
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...
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Update routing -config/urls.py
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from django.contrib import admin
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from django.urls import path, include # <-- UPDATED to add 'include'
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urlpatterns = [
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path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
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path("" , include("forms.urls")), # Forms app routing
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]
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Once we restart the project, the new route
/forms should be visible:
Django Forms - A Hello-World type route
Define a new form
Inside the newly created app, we need to create a
forms file and define the new Form Class object.1
# File contents: forms/forms.py
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from django import forms
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class HelloForm(forms.Form):
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title = forms.CharField()
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message = forms.CharField()
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email = forms.EmailField(required=False)
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After the file is saved, we can play with it using Django CLI.
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$ python .\manage.py shell
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>>>
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>>> from forms.forms import HelloForm
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>>>
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>>> my_form = HelloForm()
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>>>
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>>> print( my_form.as_ul() )
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<li><label for="id_title">Title:</label> <input type="text" name="title" required id="id_title"></li>
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<li><label for="id_message">Message:</label> <input type="text" name="message" required id="id_message"></li>
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<li><label for="id_email">Email:</label> <input type="email" name="email" id="id_email"></li>
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Using the CLI we can visualize how the form will be expended and presented to the users. Another helper provided by Django is
form.as_p() - the paragraph view of a form.1
>>>
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>>> print( my_form.as_p() )
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<p><label for="id_title">Title:</label> <input type="text" name="title" required id="id_title"></p>
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<p><label for="id_message">Message:</label> <input type="text" name="message" required id="id_message"></p>
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<p><label for="id_email">Email:</label> <input type="email" name="email" id="id_email"></p>
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>>>
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The next step is to add the necessary code to display the form on a page and manage the information submitted by users in a controller.
Controller code -forms/forms.py-indexmethod
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from .forms import HelloForm
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def index(request):
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if request.method == 'POST':
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form = HelloForm(request.POST)
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if form.is_valid():
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return HttpResponse("Form is valid")
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else:
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form = HelloForm()
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return render(request, 'hello.html', {'form': form})
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HTML page - defined informs/templatesforlder
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<!-- Forms/templates/hellp.html: partial content -->
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<form action="" method="post">
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<table>
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{{ form.as_table }}
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</table>
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{% csrf_token %}
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<br />
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<input type="submit" value="Submit">
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</form>
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Django Forms - Completed with user Data
If all fields are provided, on submit, we should see the
Form is valid message. Update the form with a new fieldID(numeric type):
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from django import forms
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class HelloForm(forms.Form):
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title = forms.CharField()
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message = forms.CharField()
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id = forms.IntegerField() # <-- NEW form field
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email = forms.EmailField(required=False)
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The page server to the users is updated automaticaly to include the new field
Django Forms - Integer Field Added
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