Working with Forms & ModelForms

🐍 DjangoLesson 8Intermediate

Django handles form rendering, validation, and serialization dynamically. You can create custom forms manually, or map forms directly to models using ModelForms.

1 Defining a ModelForm

Python — forms.py

from django import forms
from .models import Post

class PostForm(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = Post
        fields = ["title", "content", "category", "is_published"]
        widgets = {
            "title": forms.TextInput(attrs={"class": "form-control", "placeholder": "Enter title"}),
            "content": forms.Textarea(attrs={"class": "form-control", "rows": 5}),
        }

    def clean_title(self):
        title = self.cleaned_data.get("title")
        if "spam" in title.lower():
            raise forms.ValidationError("Spam titles are not allowed.")
        return title

2 Handling Forms in Views

Python — views.py

from django.shortcuts import render, redirect
from .forms import PostForm

def create_post(request):
    if request.method == "POST":
        form = PostForm(request.POST)
        if form.is_valid():
            post = form.save(commit=False)
            post.author = request.user
            post.save()
            return redirect("home")
    else:
        form = PostForm()
    return render(request, "create_post.html", {"form": form})

3 Code Challenge

Challenge: Design a custom form with field validation validating that the password matches a secondary password verification field. Throw a validation error if they do not match.