A widget is Django’s representation of an HTML input element. The widget handles the rendering of the HTML, and the extraction of data from a GET/POST dictionary that corresponds to the widget. Whenever you specify a field on a form, Django will use a default widget that is appropriate to the type of data that is to be displayed. To find which widget is used on which field, see the documentation about Built-in Field classes. This post revolves about the advanced use of widgets to modify the form structure and input type.
Default Widget in Form Fields
Every field has a predefined widget, for example IntegerField has a default widget of NumberInput. Let’s demonstrate this with help of our base project neveropen.
Refer to the following articles to check how to create a project and an app in Django.
Now let’s create a demo form in “Lazyroar/forms.py”,
from django import forms // creating a django formclass GeeksForm(forms.Form): title = forms.CharField() description = forms.CharField() views = forms.IntegerField() available = forms.BooleanField() |
Now to render this form we need to create the view and template which will be used to display the form to user. In Lazyroar/views.py, create a view
from django.shortcuts import renderfrom .forms import GeeksForm # creating a home viewdef home_view(request): context = {} form = GeeksForm(request.POST or None) context['form'] = form return render(request, "home.html", context) |
and in templates/home.html,
<form method="POST"> {% csrf_token %} {{ form.as_p }} <input type="submit" value="Submit"></form> |
Now let’s display the form by running
Python manage.py runserver
visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/
As seen in above screenshot, there is a different type of input field for IntegerField, BooleanField, etc. One can modify this using the following ways.
Custom Django form field widgets
One can override the default widget of each field for various purposes. The list of widgets can be seen here – Widgets | Django Documentation. To override the default widget we need to explicitly define the widget we want to assign to a field.
Make following changes to Lazyroar/forms.py,
from django import forms class GeeksForm(forms.Form): title = forms.CharField(widget = forms.Textarea) description = forms.CharField(widget = forms.CheckboxInput) views = forms.IntegerField(widget = forms.TextInput) available = forms.BooleanField(widget = forms.Textarea) |
Now visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/,
Thus we can assign, any widget to any field using widget attribute. Note – The validations imposed on fields would still remain same, for example even if an IntegerField is made the same as CharField, it will only accept Integer inputs.
Using Widgets to Customize DateField
widgets have a great use in Form Fields especially using Select type of widgets where one wants to limit the type and number of inputs form a user. Let’s demonstrate this with help of modifying DateField. Consider forms.py as,
from django import forms class GeeksForm(forms.Form): title = forms.CharField() description = forms.CharField() views = forms.IntegerField() date = forms.DateField() |
By default, DateField as widget TextInput. It can be seen as
Now let’s change the widget for better and convenient input from user of a date. Add SelectDateWidget to DateField in forms.py,
from django import forms class GeeksForm(forms.Form): title = forms.CharField() description = forms.CharField() views = forms.IntegerField() date = forms.DateField(widget = forms.SelectDateWidget) |
Now input of date can be seen as very easy and helpful in the front end of the application. This way we can use multiple widgets for modifying the input fields.
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