Display value of a django form field in a template?

Question

I have a form with an email property. When using {{ form.email }} in case of some validation error, django still renders the previous value in the input tag's value attribute:

<input type="text" id="id_email" maxlength="75" class="required" value="[email protected]" name="email">

I want to render the input tag myself (to add some javascript code and an error class in case of an error). For example this is my template instead of {{ form.email }}:

<input type="text" autocomplete="on" id="id_email" name="email" class="email {% if form.email.errors %}error{% endif %}">

However this does not display the errorneous value ("[email protected]" in this example) to the user. How do I get the field's value in the template?

Answer 1

{{form.fields.email}}

Answer 2

Hi Eran,

I have a simple solution for you!

{{ form.data.email }}

I tried this and it worked. This requires your view to populate the form class with the POST data.

Very simple example:

def your_view(request):
  if request.method == 'POST':
    form = YourForm(request.POST)
    if form.is_valid():
      # some code here
  else:
    form = YourForm()

  return render_to_response('template.html', {'form':form})

Hope that helps you. If you have any questions please let me know.

Answer 3

The solution proposed by Jens is correct. However, it turns out that if you initialize your ModelForm with an instance (example below) django will not populate the data:

def your_view(request):   if request.method == 'POST':
    form = UserDetailsForm(request.POST)
    if form.is_valid():
      # some code here   
    else:
      form = UserDetailsForm(instance=request.user)

So, I made my own ModelForm base class that populates the initial data:

from django import forms 
class BaseModelForm(forms.ModelForm):
    """
    Subclass of `forms.ModelForm` that makes sure the initial values
    are present in the form data, so you don't have to send all old values
    for the form to actually validate.
    """
    def merge_from_initial(self):
        filt = lambda v: v not in self.data.keys()
        for field in filter(filt, getattr(self.Meta, 'fields', ())):
            self.data[field] = self.initial.get(field, None)

Then, the simple view example looks like this:

def your_view(request):   if request.method == 'POST':
    form = UserDetailsForm(request.POST)
    if form.is_valid():
      # some code here   
    else:
      form = UserDetailsForm(instance=request.user)
      form.merge_from_initial()

Answer 4

{{ form.fields.email.initial }} seems to work.