Mastering Django: Core

Form handling with class-based views

Form processing generally has 3 paths:

• Initial GET (blank or prepopulated form)
• POST with invalid data (typically redisplay form with errors)
• POST with valid data (process the data and typically redirect)

Implementing this yourself often results in a lot of repeated boilerplate code (see Using a form in a view). To help avoid this, Django provides a collection of generic class-based views for form processing.

Basic forms

Given a simple contact form:

# forms.py 
 
from django import forms 
 
class ContactForm(forms.Form): 
   name = forms.CharField() 
   message = forms.CharField(widget=forms.Textarea) 
 
   def send_email(self): 
       # send email using the self.cleaned_data dictionary 
       pass 

The view can be constructed using a FormView:

# views.py ...