Proper way to handle multiple forms on one page in Django

Question

I have a template page expecting two forms. If I just use one form, things are fine as in this typical example:

if request.method == 'POST':
    form = AuthorForm(request.POST,)
    if form.is_valid():
        form.save()
        # do something.
else:
    form = AuthorForm()

If I want to work with multiple forms however, how do I let the view know that I'm submitting only one of the forms and not the other (i.e. it's still request.POST but I only want to process the form for which the submit happened)?

---

This is the solution base on the answer where expectedphrase and bannedphrase are the names of the submit buttons for the different forms and expectedphraseform and bannedphraseform are the forms.

    if request.method == 'POST':
    if 'bannedphrase' in request.POST:
        bannedphraseform = BannedPhraseForm(request.POST, prefix='banned')
        if bannedphraseform.is_valid():
            bannedphraseform.save()
        expectedphraseform = ExpectedPhraseForm(prefix='expected')
    elif 'expectedphrase' in request.POST:
        expectedphraseform = ExpectedPhraseForm(request.POST, prefix='expected')
        if expectedphraseform.is_valid():
            expectedphraseform.save() 
        bannedphraseform = BannedPhraseForm(prefix='banned')
else:
    bannedphraseform = BannedPhraseForm(prefix='banned')
    expectedphraseform = ExpectedPhraseForm(prefix='expected')

Answer 1

You have a few options:

1) Put different URLs in the action for the two forms. Then you'll have two different view functions to deal with the two different forms.

2) Read the submit button values from the POST data. You can tell which submit button was clicked: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/866272/how-can-i-build-multiple-submit-buttons-django-form

Answer 2

A method for future reference is something like this. bannedphraseform is the first form and expectedphraseform is the second. If the first one is hit, the second one is skipped (which is a reasonable assumption in this case):

if request.method == 'POST':
    bannedphraseform = BannedPhraseForm(request.POST, prefix='banned')
    if bannedphraseform.is_valid():
        bannedphraseform.save()
else:
    bannedphraseform = BannedPhraseForm(prefix='banned')

if request.method == 'POST' and not bannedphraseform.is_valid():
    expectedphraseform = ExpectedPhraseForm(request.POST, prefix='expected')
    bannedphraseform = BannedPhraseForm(prefix='banned')
    if expectedphraseform.is_valid():
        expectedphraseform.save()

else:
    expectedphraseform = ExpectedPhraseForm(prefix='expected')