Develop Reference

Dynamic WTForm field is not validated

If you dynamically add a field to a WTForms form, the newly-added fields are not validated (even if you add validators).
For instance, in Flask:
#app.route('/add', methods=['GET', 'POST'])
def add():
if 'state' not in session:
session['state'] = 1
form = MyForm()
if request.method == 'POST' and form.validate():
if session['state'] == 1:
setattr(
MyForm,
'asd',
StringField(
'asdfield',
validators = [
DataRequired(),
Length(min=1)
]
)
)
form = MyForm()
session['state'] = 2
return render_template(
'add.html',
form=form
)
print(len(form.asd.data)) # can equal 0
session['state'] = 1
return redirect('/add')
return render_template(
'add.html',
form=form
)
I believe this is due to the fact that form = MyForm() is run every time you go to /add, so even if session['state'] == 2 you run form.validate() on a default form which does not have the dynamically-added field. Therefore, this field cannot be part of the form validation process.
How can one properly address this behaviour ? If it's not possible, then how can one dynamically add fields to an existing form in such a way that all fields get properly validated upon submission ?

Since you call validate() before adding the field, naturally, you can't validate a field which doesn't exist yet. That said, you don't want to add a field to an instance instead of a class. This is because since WTForms processes its input data at construction, adding fields to the instance is mostly a meaningless thing.
If your field name is static, you can use the del trick detailed here
If it's dynamic, you could instead follow the dynamic form composition pattern from the docs.
Since I've gone over this in detail, I'll link my previous example here:
Wtfforms dynamic generation

How to access field names of a ModelForm in Django?

Just to be clear, I'm asking about accessing the fields in views.py
I want to add extra data into the form before it is validated (because it's a required field), and another answer on stackexchange seems to imply I have to create a new form to do so.
Right now my code look something like this:
if request.method == 'POST':
# create a form instance and populate it with data from the request:
form = TestForm(request.POST)
data = {}
for ---:
---add to data---
comp = Component.objects.get(name = path)
data['component'] = comp.id
form = TestForm(data)
if form.is_valid():
test = form.save(commit = 'false')
test.save()
return submitTest(request, var)
How could I fill in the parts with dashes?

This is the wrong thing to do. There is no reason to add in a required field programmatically; if you know the value of the field already, there is no reason to include it on the form at all.
I don't know what you mean about having to create another form; instead you should explicitly exclude that field, in the form's Meta class, and set the value on the test object before calling test.save().
Edit after comment I still don't really understand why you have data coming from two separate places, but maybe you should combine them before passing to the form:
data = request.POST.copy()
data['myvalue'] = 'myvalue'
form = MyForm(data)

I figured out what I was doing wrong. In my TestForm modelform I didn't include the 'component' field because I didn't want it to show up on the form. As a result, the 'component' data was being cleaned out during form validation even if I inserted it into the form correctly. So to solve this I just added 'component' into the fields to display, and to hide it on the form I added this line
widgets = {'component': HiddenInput()}
to the TestForm class in forms.py.

How to render an html template with data from view?

I am new to django. I made a form. I want that if the form is filled successfully then django should redirect to a success page showing the name entered in the form but no parameters should be present in the url itself.
I searched on the internet and the solution I got was to redirect to url with pk as a get parameter which fetches the data and shows in the view. But I don't want to pass any thing in the url itself. and some websites say that http can't redirect with post data.
Here's my views.py
class UserRegistrationView(CreateView):
model = UserForm
template_name = 'userregistration.html'
form_class = UserForm
success_url = 'success'
def get_success_url(self):
return reverse('success',kwargs = {'name' : self.object.firstName})
and here's the template to which I want to redirect:
<h2>Congratualations for registering {{name}} </h2>
Basically what I want is that if the person fill form mentioning his/her firstName as "xyz" then the redirected success page should say that "Congratulations for registering xyz"

You can use django sessions, which I believe installed by default in 1.8
Look here
# Set a session value:
request.session["fav_color"] = "blue"
# Get a session value -- this could be called in a different view,
# or many requests later (or both):
fav_color = request.session["fav_color"]
# Clear an item from the session:
del request.session["fav_color"]
You can pass your pk via session and extract your object in another view without affecting your url.
Make sure you clean up after yourself.
Let me know if more help needed.

One of the possible ways of passing data between views is via sessions. So, in your UserRegistrationView you need to override the form_valid method as shown below.
class UserRegsitrationView(CreateView):
def form_valid(self,form):
self.request.session['name'] = self.object.firstName
return super(UserRegistrationView,self).form_valid(form)
class SuccessView(TemplateView):
template_name = "success_template.html"
def get_context_data(self,**kwargs):
context = super(SuccessView,self).get_context_data(**kwargs)
context['name'] = self.request.session.get('name')
del self.request.session['name']
return context
One more thing that you can modify in your code is that you need not declare success_url if you are overriding get_success_url

Django edit form based on add form?

I've made a nice form, and a big complicated 'add' function for handling it. It starts like this...
def add(req):
if req.method == 'POST':
form = ArticleForm(req.POST)
if form.is_valid():
article = form.save(commit=False)
article.author = req.user
# more processing ...
Now I don't really want to duplicate all that functionality in the edit() method, so I figured edit could use the exact same template, and maybe just add an id field to the form so the add function knew what it was editing. But there's a couple problems with this
Where would I set article.id in the add func? It would have to be after form.save because that's where the article gets created, but it would never even reach that, because the form is invalid due to unique constraints (unless the user edited everything). I can just remove the is_valid check, but then form.save fails instead.
If the form actually is invalid, the field I dynamically added in the edit function isn't preserved.
So how do I deal with this?

If you are extending your form from a ModelForm, use the instance keyword argument. Here we pass either an existing instance or a new one, depending on whether we're editing or adding an existing article. In both cases the author field is set on the instance, so commit=False is not required. Note also that I'm assuming only the author may edit their own articles, hence the HttpResponseForbidden response.
from django.http import HttpResponseForbidden
from django.shortcuts import get_object_or_404, redirect, render, reverse
#login_required
def edit(request, id=None, template_name='article_edit_template.html'):
if id:
article = get_object_or_404(Article, pk=id)
if article.author != request.user:
return HttpResponseForbidden()
else:
article = Article(author=request.user)
form = ArticleForm(request.POST or None, instance=article)
if request.POST and form.is_valid():
form.save()
# Save was successful, so redirect to another page
redirect_url = reverse(article_save_success)
return redirect(redirect_url)
return render(request, template_name, {
'form': form
})
And in your urls.py:
(r'^article/new/$', views.edit, {}, 'article_new'),
(r'^article/edit/(?P<id>\d+)/$', views.edit, {}, 'article_edit'),
The same edit view is used for both adds and edits, but only the edit url pattern passes an id to the view. To make this work well with your form you'll need to omit the author field from the form:
class ArticleForm(forms.ModelForm):
class Meta:
model = Article
exclude = ('author',)

You can have hidden ID field in form and for edit form it will be passed with the form for add form you can set it in req.POST e.g.
formData = req.POST.copy()
formData['id'] = getNewID()
and pass that formData to form

How do I associate input to a Form with a Model in Django?

In Django, how do I associate a Form with a Model so that data entered into the form are inserted into the database table associated with the Model? How do I save that user input to that database table?
For example:
class PhoneNumber(models.Model):
FirstName = models.CharField(max_length=30)
LastName = models.CharField(max_length=30)
PhoneNumber = models.CharField(max_length=20)
class PhoneNumber(forms.Form):
FirstName = forms.CharField(max_length=30)
LastName = forms.CharField(max_length=30)
PhoneNumber = forms.CharField(max_length=20)
I know there is a class for creating a form from the the model, but even there I'm unclear on how the data actually gets to the database. And I'd like to understand the inner workings before I move on to the time-savers. If there is a simple example of how this works in the docs, I've missed it.
Thanks.
UPDATED:
To be clear -- I do know about the ModelForm tool, I'm trying to figure out how to do this without that -- in part so I can better understand what it's doing in the first place.
ANSWERED:
With the help of the anwers, I arrived at this solution:
Form definition:
class ThisForm(forms.Form)
[various Field assignments]
model = ThisModel()
Code in views to save entered data to database:
if request_method == 'POST':
form = ThisForm(request.POST)
if form.is_valid():
for key, value in form.cleaned_data.items():
setattr(form.model, key, value)
form.model.save(form.model)
After this the data entered in the browser form was in the database table.
Note that the call of the model's save() method required passage of the model itself as an argument. I have no idea why.
CAVEAT: I'm a newbie. This succeeded in getting data from a browser to a database table, but God only knows what I've neglected or missed or outright broken along the way. ModelForm definitely seems like a much cleaner solution.

Back when I first used Forms and Models (without using ModelForm), what I remember doing was checking if the form was valid, which would set your cleaned data, manually moving the data from the form to the model (or whatever other processing you want to do), and then saving the model. As you can tell, this was extremely tedious when your form exactly (or even closely) matches your model. By using the ModelForm (since you said you weren't quite sure how it worked), when you save the ModelForm, it instantiates an object with the form data according to the model spec and then saves that model for you. So all-in-all, the flow of data goes from the HTML form, to the Django Form, to the Django Model, to the DB.
Some actual code for your questions:
To get the browser form data into the form object:
if request.method == 'POST':
form = SomeForm(request.POST)
if form.is_valid():
model.attr = form.cleaned_data['attr']
model.attr2 = form.cleaned_data['attr2']
model.save()
else:
form = SomeForm()
return render_to_response('page.html', {'form': form, })
In the template page you can do things like this with the form:
<form method="POST">
{{ form.as_p }}
<input type="submit"/>
</form>
That's just one example that I pulled from here.

I'm not sure which class do you mean. I know that there were a helper, something like form_for_model (don't really remember the exact name; that was way before 1.0 version was released). Right now I'd it that way:
import myproject.myapp.models as models
class PhoneNumberForm(forms.ModelForm):
class Meta:
model = models.PhoneNumber
To see the metaclass magic behind, you'd have to look into the code as there is a lot to explain :]. The constructor of the form can take instance argument. Passing it will make the form operate on an existing record rather than creating a new one. More info here.

I think ModelForm.save documentation should explain it. With its base class (Form) you would need to use the Form.cleaned_data() to get the field values and set them to appropriate Model fields "by hand". ModelForm does all that for you.

The Django documentation is pretty clear on this subject. However, here is a rough guide for you to get started: You can either override the form's save method or implement that functionality in the view.
if form.is_valid() # validation - first the fields, then the form itself is validated
form.save()
inside the form:
def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
foo = Foo()
foo.somefield = self.cleaned_data['somefield']
foo.otherfield = self.cleaned_data['otherfield']
...
return foo.save()