Form fields | Django documentation (original) (raw)

class Field(**kwargs)

When you create a Form class, the most important part is defining the fields of the form. Each field has custom validation logic, along with a few other hooks.

Field. clean(value)

Although the primary way you’ll use Field classes is in Form classes, you can also instantiate them and use them directly to get a better idea of how they work. Each Field instance has a clean() method, which takes a single argument and either raises a django.forms.ValidationErrorexception or returns the clean value:

from django import forms f = forms.EmailField() f.clean('foo@example.com') 'foo@example.com' f.clean('invalid email address') Traceback (most recent call last): ... ValidationError: ['Enter a valid email address.']

Core field arguments

Each Field class constructor takes at least these arguments. SomeField classes take additional, field-specific arguments, but the following should always be accepted:

required

Field. required

By default, each Field class assumes the value is required, so if you pass an empty value – either None or the empty string ("") – thenclean() will raise a ValidationError exception:

from django import forms f = forms.CharField() f.clean('foo') 'foo' f.clean('') Traceback (most recent call last): ... ValidationError: ['This field is required.'] f.clean(None) Traceback (most recent call last): ... ValidationError: ['This field is required.'] f.clean(' ') ' ' f.clean(0) '0' f.clean(True) 'True' f.clean(False) 'False'

To specify that a field is not required, pass required=False to theField constructor:

f = forms.CharField(required=False) f.clean('foo') 'foo' f.clean('') '' f.clean(None) '' f.clean(0) '0' f.clean(True) 'True' f.clean(False) 'False'

If a Field has required=False and you pass clean() an empty value, then clean() will return a normalized empty value rather than raisingValidationError. For CharField, this will be an empty string. For otherField classes, it might be None. (This varies from field to field.)

Widgets of required form fields have the required HTML attribute. Set theForm.use_required_attribute attribute to False to disable it. Therequired attribute isn’t included on forms of formsets because the browser validation may not be correct when adding and deleting formsets.

label

Field. label

The label argument lets you specify the “human-friendly” label for this field. This is used when the Field is displayed in a Form.

As explained in “Outputting forms as HTML” above, the default label for aField is generated from the field name by converting all underscores to spaces and upper-casing the first letter. Specify label if that default behavior doesn’t result in an adequate label.

Here’s a full example Form that implements label for two of its fields. We’ve specified auto_id=False to simplify the output:

from django import forms class CommentForm(forms.Form): ... name = forms.CharField(label='Your name') ... url = forms.URLField(label='Your website', required=False) ... comment = forms.CharField() f = CommentForm(auto_id=False) print(f)

Your name: Your website: Comment:

label_suffix

Field. label_suffix

The label_suffix argument lets you override the form’slabel_suffix on a per-field basis:

class ContactForm(forms.Form): ... age = forms.IntegerField() ... nationality = forms.CharField() ... captcha_answer = forms.IntegerField(label='2 + 2', label_suffix=' =') f = ContactForm(label_suffix='?') print(f.as_p())

Age?

Nationality?

2 + 2 =

initial

Field. initial

The initial argument lets you specify the initial value to use when rendering this Field in an unbound Form.

To specify dynamic initial data, see the Form.initial parameter.

The use-case for this is when you want to display an “empty” form in which a field is initialized to a particular value. For example:

from django import forms class CommentForm(forms.Form): ... name = forms.CharField(initial='Your name') ... url = forms.URLField(initial='http://') ... comment = forms.CharField() f = CommentForm(auto_id=False) print(f)

Name: Url: Comment:

You may be thinking, why not just pass a dictionary of the initial values as data when displaying the form? Well, if you do that, you’ll trigger validation, and the HTML output will include any validation errors:

class CommentForm(forms.Form): ... name = forms.CharField() ... url = forms.URLField() ... comment = forms.CharField() default_data = {'name': 'Your name', 'url': 'http://'} f = CommentForm(default_data, auto_id=False) print(f)

Name: Url: Comment:

This is why initial values are only displayed for unbound forms. For bound forms, the HTML output will use the bound data.

Also note that initial values are not used as “fallback” data in validation if a particular field’s value is not given. initial values are_only_ intended for initial form display:

class CommentForm(forms.Form): ... name = forms.CharField(initial='Your name') ... url = forms.URLField(initial='http://') ... comment = forms.CharField() data = {'name': '', 'url': '', 'comment': 'Foo'} f = CommentForm(data) f.is_valid() False

The form does not fall back to using the initial values.

f.errors {'url': ['This field is required.'], 'name': ['This field is required.']}

Instead of a constant, you can also pass any callable:

import datetime class DateForm(forms.Form): ... day = forms.DateField(initial=datetime.date.today) print(DateForm())

Day:

The callable will be evaluated only when the unbound form is displayed, not when it is defined.

help_text

Field. help_text

The help_text argument lets you specify descriptive text for thisField. If you provide help_text, it will be displayed next to theField when the Field is rendered by one of the convenience Formmethods (e.g., as_ul()).

Like the model field’s help_text, this value isn’t HTML-escaped in automatically-generated forms.

Here’s a full example Form that implements help_text for two of its fields. We’ve specified auto_id=False to simplify the output:

from django import forms class HelpTextContactForm(forms.Form): ... subject = forms.CharField(max_length=100, help_text='100 characters max.') ... message = forms.CharField() ... sender = forms.EmailField(help_text='A valid email address, please.') ... cc_myself = forms.BooleanField(required=False) f = HelpTextContactForm(auto_id=False) print(f.as_table())

Subject:
100 characters max. Message: Sender:
A valid email address, please. Cc myself: >>> print(f.as_ul()))
  • Subject: 100 characters max.
  • Message:
  • Sender: A valid email address, please.
  • Cc myself:
  • >>> print(f.as_p())

    Subject: 100 characters max.

    Message:

    Sender: A valid email address, please.

    Cc myself:

    error_messages

    Field. error_messages

    The error_messages argument lets you override the default messages that the field will raise. Pass in a dictionary with keys matching the error messages you want to override. For example, here is the default error message:

    from django import forms generic = forms.CharField() generic.clean('') Traceback (most recent call last): ... ValidationError: ['This field is required.']

    And here is a custom error message:

    name = forms.CharField(error_messages={'required': 'Please enter your name'}) name.clean('') Traceback (most recent call last): ... ValidationError: ['Please enter your name']

    In the built-in Field classes section below, each Field defines the error message keys it uses.

    validators

    Field. validators

    The validators argument lets you provide a list of validation functions for this field.

    See the validators documentation for more information.

    localize

    Field. localize

    The localize argument enables the localization of form data input, as well as the rendered output.

    See the format localization documentation for more information.

    disabled

    Field. disabled

    The disabled boolean argument, when set to True, disables a form field using the disabled HTML attribute so that it won’t be editable by users. Even if a user tampers with the field’s value submitted to the server, it will be ignored in favor of the value from the form’s initial data.

    Checking if the field data has changed

    has_changed()

    Field. has_changed()

    The has_changed() method is used to determine if the field value has changed from the initial value. Returns True or False.

    See the Form.has_changed() documentation for more information.

    Built-in Field classes

    Naturally, the forms library comes with a set of Field classes that represent common validation needs. This section documents each built-in field.

    For each field, we describe the default widget used if you don’t specifywidget. We also specify the value returned when you provide an empty value (see the section on required above to understand what that means).

    BooleanField

    class BooleanField(**kwargs)

    Note

    Since all Field subclasses have required=True by default, the validation condition here is important. If you want to include a boolean in your form that can be either True or False (e.g. a checked or unchecked checkbox), you must remember to pass in required=False when creating the BooleanField.

    CharField

    class CharField(**kwargs)

    Has three optional arguments for validation:

    max_length

    min_length

    If provided, these arguments ensure that the string is at most or at least the given length.

    strip

    If True (default), the value will be stripped of leading and trailing whitespace.

    empty_value

    The value to use to represent “empty”. Defaults to an empty string.

    ChoiceField

    class ChoiceField(**kwargs)

    The invalid_choice error message may contain %(value)s, which will be replaced with the selected choice.

    Takes one extra argument:

    choices

    Either an iterable of 2-tuples to use as choices for this field, enumeration choices, or a callable that returns such an iterable. This argument accepts the same formats as the choices argument to a model field. See themodel field reference documentation on choicesfor more details. If the argument is a callable, it is evaluated each time the field’s form is initialized. Defaults to an empty list.

    TypedChoiceField

    class TypedChoiceField(**kwargs)

    Just like a ChoiceField, except TypedChoiceField takes two extra arguments, coerce and empty_value.

    Takes extra arguments:

    coerce

    A function that takes one argument and returns a coerced value. Examples include the built-in int, float, bool and other types. Defaults to an identity function. Note that coercion happens after input validation, so it is possible to coerce to a value not present inchoices.

    empty_value

    The value to use to represent “empty.” Defaults to the empty string;None is another common choice here. Note that this value will not be coerced by the function given in the coerce argument, so choose it accordingly.

    DateField

    class DateField(**kwargs)

    Takes one optional argument:

    input_formats

    A list of formats used to attempt to convert a string to a validdatetime.date object.

    If no input_formats argument is provided, the default input formats are taken from DATE_INPUT_FORMATS if USE_L10N isFalse, or from the active locale format DATE_INPUT_FORMATS key if localization is enabled. See also format localization.

    DateTimeField

    class DateTimeField(**kwargs)

    Takes one optional argument:

    input_formats

    A list of formats used to attempt to convert a string to a validdatetime.datetime object.

    If no input_formats argument is provided, the default input formats are taken from DATETIME_INPUT_FORMATS if USE_L10N isFalse, or from the active locale format DATETIME_INPUT_FORMATS key if localization is enabled. See also format localization.

    DecimalField

    class DecimalField(**kwargs)

    The max_value and min_value error messages may contain%(limit_value)s, which will be substituted by the appropriate limit. Similarly, the max_digits, max_decimal_places andmax_whole_digits error messages may contain %(max)s.

    Takes four optional arguments:

    max_value

    min_value

    These control the range of values permitted in the field, and should be given as decimal.Decimal values.

    max_digits

    The maximum number of digits (those before the decimal point plus those after the decimal point, with leading zeros stripped) permitted in the value.

    decimal_places

    The maximum number of decimal places permitted.

    EmailField

    class EmailField(**kwargs)

    Has two optional arguments for validation, max_length and min_length. If provided, these arguments ensure that the string is at most or at least the given length.

    FileField

    class FileField(**kwargs)

    Has two optional arguments for validation, max_length andallow_empty_file. If provided, these ensure that the file name is at most the given length, and that validation will succeed even if the file content is empty.

    To learn more about the UploadedFile object, see the file uploads documentation.

    When you use a FileField in a form, you must also remember tobind the file data to the form.

    The max_length error refers to the length of the filename. In the error message for that key, %(max)d will be replaced with the maximum filename length and %(length)d will be replaced with the current filename length.

    FilePathField

    class FilePathField(**kwargs)

    The field allows choosing from files inside a certain directory. It takes five extra arguments; only path is required:

    path

    The absolute path to the directory whose contents you want listed. This directory must exist.

    recursive

    If False (the default) only the direct contents of path will be offered as choices. If True, the directory will be descended into recursively and all descendants will be listed as choices.

    match

    A regular expression pattern; only files with names matching this expression will be allowed as choices.

    allow_files

    Optional. Either True or False. Default is True. Specifies whether files in the specified location should be included. Either this orallow_folders must be True.

    allow_folders

    Optional. Either True or False. Default is False. Specifies whether folders in the specified location should be included. Either this orallow_files must be True.

    FloatField

    class FloatField(**kwargs)

    Takes two optional arguments for validation, max_value and min_value. These control the range of values permitted in the field.

    ImageField

    class ImageField(**kwargs)

    Using an ImageField requires that Pillow is installed with support for the image formats you use. If you encounter a corrupt image error when you upload an image, it usually means that Pillow doesn’t understand its format. To fix this, install the appropriate library and reinstall Pillow.

    When you use an ImageField on a form, you must also remember tobind the file data to the form.

    After the field has been cleaned and validated, the UploadedFileobject will have an additional image attribute containing the PillowImage instance used to check if the file was a valid image. Pillow closes the underlying file descriptor after verifying an image, so whilst non-image data attributes, such as format, height, and width, are available, methods that access the underlying image data, such asgetdata() or getpixel(), cannot be used without reopening the file. For example:

    from PIL import Image from django import forms from django.core.files.uploadedfile import SimpleUploadedFile class ImageForm(forms.Form): ... img = forms.ImageField() file_data = {'img': SimpleUploadedFile('test.png', )} form = ImageForm({}, file_data)

    Pillow closes the underlying file descriptor.

    form.is_valid() True image_field = form.cleaned_data['img'] image_field.image <PIL.PngImagePlugin.PngImageFile image mode=RGBA size=191x287 at 0x7F5985045C18> image_field.image.width 191 image_field.image.height 287 image_field.image.format 'PNG' image_field.image.getdata()

    Raises AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'seek'.

    image = Image.open(image_field) image.getdata() <ImagingCore object at 0x7f5984f874b0>

    Additionally, UploadedFile.content_type will be updated with the image’s content type if Pillow can determine it, otherwise it will be set to None.

    IntegerField

    class IntegerField(**kwargs)

    The max_value and min_value error messages may contain%(limit_value)s, which will be substituted by the appropriate limit.

    Takes two optional arguments for validation:

    max_value

    min_value

    These control the range of values permitted in the field.

    GenericIPAddressField

    class GenericIPAddressField(**kwargs)

    A field containing either an IPv4 or an IPv6 address.

    The IPv6 address normalization follows RFC 4291#section-2.2 section 2.2, including using the IPv4 format suggested in paragraph 3 of that section, like::ffff:192.0.2.0. For example, 2001:0::0:01 would be normalized to2001::1, and ::ffff:0a0a:0a0a to ::ffff:10.10.10.10. All characters are converted to lowercase.

    Takes two optional arguments:

    protocol

    Limits valid inputs to the specified protocol. Accepted values are both (default), IPv4or IPv6. Matching is case insensitive.

    unpack_ipv4

    Unpacks IPv4 mapped addresses like ::ffff:192.0.2.1. If this option is enabled that address would be unpacked to192.0.2.1. Default is disabled. Can only be used when protocol is set to 'both'.

    MultipleChoiceField

    class MultipleChoiceField(**kwargs)

    The invalid_choice error message may contain %(value)s, which will be replaced with the selected choice.

    Takes one extra required argument, choices, as for ChoiceField.

    TypedMultipleChoiceField

    class TypedMultipleChoiceField(**kwargs)

    Just like a MultipleChoiceField, except TypedMultipleChoiceFieldtakes two extra arguments, coerce and empty_value.

    The invalid_choice error message may contain %(value)s, which will be replaced with the selected choice.

    Takes two extra arguments, coerce and empty_value, as forTypedChoiceField.

    NullBooleanField

    class NullBooleanField(**kwargs)

    RegexField

    class RegexField(**kwargs)

    Takes one required argument:

    regex

    A regular expression specified either as a string or a compiled regular expression object.

    Also takes max_length, min_length, and strip, which work just as they do for CharField.

    strip

    Defaults to False. If enabled, stripping will be applied before the regex validation.

    SlugField

    class SlugField(**kwargs)

    This field is intended for use in representing a modelSlugField in forms.

    Takes an optional parameter:

    allow_unicode

    A boolean instructing the field to accept Unicode letters in addition to ASCII letters. Defaults to False.

    TimeField

    class TimeField(**kwargs)

    Takes one optional argument:

    input_formats

    A list of formats used to attempt to convert a string to a validdatetime.time object.

    If no input_formats argument is provided, the default input formats are taken from TIME_INPUT_FORMATS if USE_L10N isFalse, or from the active locale format TIME_INPUT_FORMATS key if localization is enabled. See also format localization.

    URLField

    class URLField(**kwargs)

    Takes the following optional arguments:

    max_length

    min_length

    These are the same as CharField.max_length and CharField.min_length.

    UUIDField

    class UUIDField(**kwargs)

    This field will accept any string format accepted as the hex argument to the UUID constructor.

    Slightly complex built-in Field classes

    ComboField

    class ComboField(**kwargs)

    Takes one extra required argument:

    fields

    The list of fields that should be used to validate the field’s value (in the order in which they are provided).

    from django.forms import ComboField f = ComboField(fields=[CharField(max_length=20), EmailField()]) f.clean('test@example.com') 'test@example.com' f.clean('longemailaddress@example.com') Traceback (most recent call last): ... ValidationError: ['Ensure this value has at most 20 characters (it has 28).']

    MultiValueField

    class MultiValueField(fields=(), **kwargs)

    Aggregates the logic of multiple fields that together produce a single value.

    This field is abstract and must be subclassed. In contrast with the single-value fields, subclasses of MultiValueField must not implement clean() but instead - implementcompress().

    Takes one extra required argument:

    fields

    A tuple of fields whose values are cleaned and subsequently combined into a single value. Each value of the field is cleaned by the corresponding field in fields – the first value is cleaned by the first field, the second value is cleaned by the second field, etc. Once all fields are cleaned, the list of clean values is combined into a single value by compress().

    Also takes some optional arguments:

    require_all_fields

    Defaults to True, in which case a required validation error will be raised if no value is supplied for any field.

    When set to False, the Field.required attribute can be set to False for individual fields to make them optional. If no value is supplied for a required field, an incomplete validation error will be raised.

    A default incomplete error message can be defined on theMultiValueField subclass, or different messages can be defined on each individual field. For example:

    from django.core.validators import RegexValidator

    class PhoneField(MultiValueField): def init(self, **kwargs): # Define one message for all fields. error_messages = { 'incomplete': 'Enter a country calling code and a phone number.', } # Or define a different message for each field. fields = ( CharField( error_messages={'incomplete': 'Enter a country calling code.'}, validators=[ RegexValidator(r'^[0-9]+$', 'Enter a valid country calling code.'), ], ), CharField( error_messages={'incomplete': 'Enter a phone number.'}, validators=[RegexValidator(r'^[0-9]+$', 'Enter a valid phone number.')], ), CharField( validators=[RegexValidator(r'^[0-9]+$', 'Enter a valid extension.')], required=False, ), ) super().init( error_messages=error_messages, fields=fields, require_all_fields=False, **kwargs )

    widget

    Must be a subclass of django.forms.MultiWidget. Default value is TextInput, which probably is not very useful in this case.

    compress(data_list)

    Takes a list of valid values and returns a “compressed” version of those values – in a single value. For example,SplitDateTimeField is a subclass which combines a time field and a date field into a datetime object.

    This method must be implemented in the subclasses.

    SplitDateTimeField

    class SplitDateTimeField(**kwargs)

    Takes two optional arguments:

    input_date_formats

    A list of formats used to attempt to convert a string to a validdatetime.date object.

    If no input_date_formats argument is provided, the default input formats for DateField are used.

    input_time_formats

    A list of formats used to attempt to convert a string to a validdatetime.time object.

    If no input_time_formats argument is provided, the default input formats for TimeField are used.

    Fields which handle relationships

    Two fields are available for representing relationships between models: ModelChoiceField andModelMultipleChoiceField. Both of these fields require a single queryset parameter that is used to create the choices for the field. Upon form validation, these fields will place either one model object (in the case of ModelChoiceField) or multiple model objects (in the case of ModelMultipleChoiceField) into thecleaned_data dictionary of the form.

    For more complex uses, you can specify queryset=None when declaring the form field and then populate the queryset in the form’s __init__()method:

    class FooMultipleChoiceForm(forms.Form): foo_select = forms.ModelMultipleChoiceField(queryset=None)

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self.fields['foo_select'].queryset = ...

    ModelChoiceField

    class ModelChoiceField(**kwargs)

    Allows the selection of a single model object, suitable for representing a foreign key. Note that the default widget for ModelChoiceField becomes impractical when the number of entries increases. You should avoid using it for more than 100 items.

    A single argument is required:

    queryset

    A QuerySet of model objects from which the choices for the field are derived and which is used to validate the user’s selection. It’s evaluated when the form is rendered.

    ModelChoiceField also takes two optional arguments:

    empty_label

    By default the <select> widget used by ModelChoiceField will have an empty choice at the top of the list. You can change the text of this label (which is "---------" by default) with the empty_labelattribute, or you can disable the empty label entirely by settingempty_label to None:

    A custom empty label

    field1 = forms.ModelChoiceField(queryset=..., empty_label="(Nothing)")

    No empty label

    field2 = forms.ModelChoiceField(queryset=..., empty_label=None)

    Note that if a ModelChoiceField is required and has a default initial value, no empty choice is created (regardless of the value of empty_label).

    to_field_name

    This optional argument is used to specify the field to use as the value of the choices in the field’s widget. Be sure it’s a unique field for the model, otherwise the selected value could match more than one object. By default it is set to None, in which case the primary key of each object will be used. For example:

    No custom to_field_name

    field1 = forms.ModelChoiceField(queryset=...)

    would yield:

    ...

    and:

    to_field_name provided

    field2 = forms.ModelChoiceField(queryset=..., to_field_name="name")

    would yield:

    ...

    The __str__() method of the model will be called to generate string representations of the objects for use in the field’s choices. To provide customized representations, subclass ModelChoiceField and overridelabel_from_instance. This method will receive a model object and should return a string suitable for representing it. For example:

    from django.forms import ModelChoiceField

    class MyModelChoiceField(ModelChoiceField): def label_from_instance(self, obj): return "My Object #%i" % obj.id

    ModelMultipleChoiceField

    class ModelMultipleChoiceField(**kwargs)

    The invalid_choice message may contain %(value)s and theinvalid_pk_value message may contain %(pk)s, which will be substituted by the appropriate values.

    Allows the selection of one or more model objects, suitable for representing a many-to-many relation. As with ModelChoiceField, you can use label_from_instance to customize the object representations.

    A single argument is required:

    queryset

    Same as ModelChoiceField.queryset.

    Takes one optional argument:

    to_field_name

    Same as ModelChoiceField.to_field_name.

    Creating custom fields

    If the built-in Field classes don’t meet your needs, you can create customField classes. To do this, create a subclass of django.forms.Field. Its only requirements are that it implement a clean() method and that its__init__() method accept the core arguments mentioned above (required,label, initial, widget, help_text).

    You can also customize how a field will be accessed by overridingget_bound_field().