How do I add plain text info to forms in a formset in Django?

Question

I want to show a title and description from a db query in each form, but I don't want it to be in a charfield, I want it to be html-formatted text.

sample template code:

{% for form, data in zipped_data %}
   <div class="row">
      <div class="first_col">
         <span class="title">{{ data.0 }}</span>
         <div class="desc">
            {{ data.1|default:"None" }}
         </div>
      </div>
      {% for field in form %}
         <div class="fieldWrapper" style="float: left; ">
            {{ field.errors }}
            {{ field }}
         </div>
      {% endfor %}
{% endfor %}

Is this the most idiomatic way of doing this? Or, is there a way to add text that will not be displayed inside of a textarea or text input to my model:

class ReportForm(forms.Form):
   comment = forms.CharField()

?

Answer 1

Instead of zipping your forms with the additional data, you can override the constructor on your form and hold your title/description as instance-level member variables. This is a bit more object-oriented and learning how to do this will help you solve other problems down the road such as dynamic choice fields.

class MyForm (forms.Form):
    def __init__ (self, title, desc, *args, **kwargs):
        self.title = title
        self.desc = desc
        super (MyForm, self).__init__ (*args, **kwargs) # call base class

Then in your view code:

form = MyForm ('Title A', 'Description A')

Adjust accordingly if you need these values to come from the database. Then in your template, you access the instance variables just like you do anything else, e.g.:

   <h1>{{ form.title }}</h1>
   <p>{{ form.desc }}</p>

From the way you phrased your question, I think you probably have some confusion around the way Django uses Python class attributes to provide a declarative form API versus instance-level attributes that you apply to individual instances of a class, in this case your form objects.

• Check out this link for a good discussion on the distinction
• And this one

Answer 2

I just created a read-only widget by subclassing the text input field one:

class ReadOnlyText(forms.TextInput):
  input_type = 'text'

  def render(self, name, value, attrs=None):
     if value is None: 
         value = ''
     return value

And:

class ReportForm(forms.Form):
  comment = forms.CharField(widget=ReadOnlyText, label='comment')

Answer 3

I had to solve a similar problem and like your idea Andrei. I had some issues using it though, as, if there were validation errors, the value of the read-only field would get lost. To solve this, I did something similar but overrode HiddenInput instead and kept the value in a hidden form field. ie:

class ReadOnlyText(forms.HiddenInput):
    input_type = 'hidden'

    def render(self, name, value, attrs=None):
        if value is None:
            value = '' 
        return mark_safe(value + super(ReadOnlyTextWidget, self).render(name, value, attrs))

class ReportForm(forms.Form):
  comment = forms.CharField(widget=ReadOnlyText, label='comment')