Develop Reference

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 can I use form data in Django directly as context in another view

I'm having big trouble understanding the whole forms business in django. As I understand it the cleaned form data is a dictionary. So all my defined form fields should be in the dictionary like so: {'definedform': userinput, ...}. Is this correct?
I want to create a form in which a user can input data. This data should then be send to a different view, in which the inputted data is rendered with a latex template (and subsequently rendered into a pdf). This works more or less fine if I define the context in the /create_pdf/ view and grab the user input manually. But I suppose there is a nicer way. What I think should work:
def index(request):
if request.method == "POST":
persoform = PersonalForm(request.POST, prefix='personal')
if persoform.is_valid():
content = persoform.cleaned_data()
content = Context(content)
return HttpResponseRedirect('/create_pdf/')
else:
persoform = PersonalForm()
return render(request, 'app/template.html', {'persoform': persoform})
And in my /create_pdf/ view:
def create_pdf(request):
template = get_template('app/latextemplate.tex')
rendered_tpl = template.render(content)
[...]
So, how can I make sure, to pass the data from my index view to my create_pdf view?
EDIT:
Forgot to mention: The error is "'content' not defined". So I understand that the /create_pdf/ view doesn't get content dictionary, but I have no idea how I would make sure that it does.

Put the data in to the session on submit, and pop it out in the second view.
if form.is_valid():
request.session['perso'] = form.cleaned_data
return HttpResponseRedirect('/create_pdf/')
...
def create_pdf(request):
data = request.session.pop('perso'], {})

django - how to implement a 2-step publish mechanism

I'm new to both web development and django so maybe that's a noob question.
I want to do the following:
Ask user to fill some form and submit it.
Then, parse and format the content and display it back to the user to let him verify it.
User can accept the result or go back to the previous view, update data and resend.
This is as far as I can think:
views.py
def add_content(request):
if request.method == 'POST':
form = AddContentForm(request.POST)
if form.is_valid():
content = form.save(commit=False)
return verify_content(request, content)
else:
form = AddContentForm()
return render(request, 'myapp/add_content.html', {'form' : form})
def verify_content(request, content):
return render(request, 'myapp/verify_content.html', {'content' : content})
The verify_content template will obviously contain two buttons ('back', 'ok'), but I don't know how to pass the content object to a view for saving it in the db, or send it back to the previous view from there. Should I use js? Can i do it with just server side code?
Maybe my whole logic is wrong. Should I save the object in the db before verification and then delete it if needed (sounds ugly)? What is a good way to implement this?
Thanks in advance for your time.

You could use the users session for this:
request.session['content'] = content
and in the view where the user should verify his input do:
content = request.session['content']
and voilá you got the content between 2 views.
Django also secures that users can't tinker with its data by either saving it server side, or in a signed cookie.

I would save the form with commit=True in the add_content view, and would add a verified field or something to the model. Then you can append the pk as GET parameter to the link which will get you back to add_content view from verify. You can extract the parameter from request.GET dict.

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

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()