Comments on: Adventures in Django and Python – Part III

By: Andrew Shultz

Andrew Shultz — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 02:14:05 +0000

You could do something crazy like subclass the form and give it special processing that will munge some of the fields in ways you approve of. We did that back on 0.96 to use the automatic model form fields but have some of them hidden (there was no “uneditable” then) or to be able to set the entire form to be uneditable.

In the process I hacked up the automatic form generation a fair bit – unfortunately not all the required pieces were exposed by newforms at the time, which was very irritating since I don't expect to have python modules have functions I'm not allowed to get to somehow. I expect many of the specifics have changed but the basic idea might still work, though not cleanly.

By: Andrew Shultz

Andrew Shultz — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 22:14:05 +0000

By: Jonathan Buchanan

Jonathan Buchanan — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 17:49:05 +0000

In addition to letting you easily generate HTML4 from your forms (slash, begone!), the "field" template tag provided by http://github.com/simonw/django-html/ lets you specify attributes for rendered form fields:

{% field form.somefield class="special" %}

By: matticakes

matticakes — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 14:46:40 +0000

You have to define those attributes somewhere. It makes more sense (to me) to do that within the template than in your form definition or in your view.

Even if you ultimately style the attributes using CSS you have to specify that class somewhere. I'd like to able to easily do that from within the template.

By: andybak

andybak — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 10:19:13 +0000

Shouldn't those attributes be defined in CSS? Then it's not quite so unappealing to simply use attrs to modify or append to the class name (even this might not be needed – you can use the id assigned to each form element or just use CSS attribute selectors)

By: matticakes

matticakes — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 20:06:13 +0000

try the

 HTML tag


@register.filter
def with_attrs(value, arg):
	attrs = {}
	for x in arg.split(','):
		v = x.strip().split('=')
		attrs[v[0]] = v[1]

	return value.as_widget(attrs=attrs)

By: John

John — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 20:00:55 +0000

A quick look at BoundField and it does not appear the chaining of attrs would work. Maybe a comma: (how do you make this thing keep formatting?)

@register.filter
def with_attrs(value, arg):
attrs = {}
for x in arg.split(','):
v = x.strip().split('=')
attrs[v[0]] = v[1]

return value.as_widget(attrs=attrs)

By: John

John — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:28:05 +0000

Yea, like i said this had been floating around for a while.. Space was just the first thing that jumped out at me. Of course that does not work for style stuff.

might be better to write it so it can be chained:

{{ form.name|with_attrs:"size=10"|with_attrs:"style: width: 720px" }}

By: matticakes

matticakes — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:21:17 +0000

I looked up the 'attrs' documentation, which is sparse. I don't think it's the responsibility of the view or the Form definition to define template related attributes like style, size, etc. I think these attributes should elegantly be modified within the template.

By: matticakes

matticakes — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:20:07 +0000

John, this is exactly in line with what I'd like to be able to accomplish. I like where you're going with this.

Perhaps splitting on something other than a space?