django-superform 0.2.0

django-superform

Less sucking formsets.

A SuperForm is absolutely super if you want to nest a lot of forms in each other. Use formsets and nested forms inside the SuperForm. The SuperForm will take care of its children!

Imagine you want to have a view that shows and validates a form and a formset. Let’s say you have a signup form where users can enter multiple email addresses. Django provides formsets for this usecase, but handling those in a view is usually quite troublesome. You need to validate both the form and the formset manually and you cannot use django’s generic FormView. So here comes django-superform into play.

Here we have an example for the usecase. Let’s have a look at the forms.py:

from django import forms
from django_superform import SuperModelForm, InlineFormSetField
from myapp.models import Account, Email


class EmailForm(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = Email
        fields = ('account', 'email',)


EmailFormSet = modelformset_factory(EmailForm)


class SignupForm(SuperModelForm):
    username = forms.CharField()
    # The model `Email` has a ForeignKey called `user` to `Account`.
    emails = InlineFormSetField(formset_class=EmailFormSet)

    class Meta:
        model = Account
        fields = ('username',)

So we assign the EmailFormSet as a field directly to the SignupForm. That’s where it belongs! Ok and how do I handle this composite form in the view? Have a look:

def post_form(request):
    if request.method == 'POST':
        form = PostForm(request.POST)
        if form.is_valid():
            account = form.save()
            return HttpResponseRedirect('/success/')
    else:
        form = PostForm()
    return render_to_response('post_form.html', {
        'form',
    }, context_instance=RequestContext(request))

No, we don’t do anything different as we would do without having the FormSet on the SignupForm. That way you are free to implement all the logic in the form it self where it belongs and use generic views like CreateView you would use them with simple forms. Want an example for this?

from django.views.generic import CreateView
from myapp.models import Account
from myapp.forms import SignupForm


class SignupView(CreateView):
    model = Account
    form_class = SignupForm


urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url('^signup/$', SignupView.as_view()),
)

And it just works.

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