Django form field custom widgets

A widget is Django’s representation of an HTML input element. The widget handles the rendering of the HTML, and the extraction of data from a GET/POST dictionary that corresponds to the widget. Whenever you specify a field on a form, Django will use a default widget that is appropriate to the type of data that is to be displayed. To find which widget is used on which field, see the documentation about Built-in Field classes. This post revolves about the advanced use of widgets to modify the form structure and input type.

Every field has a predefined widget, for example IntegerField has a default widget of NumberInput. Let’s demonstrate this with help of our base project mcatutorials.

Refer to the following articles to check how to create a project and an app in Django.

• How to Create a Basic Project using MVT in Django?
• How to Create an App in Django ?

Now let’s create a demo form in “mcatutorials/forms.py”,

from django import forms 
  
// creating a django form 
class McatutorialsForm(forms.Form): 
    title = forms.CharField() 
    description = forms.CharField() 
    views = forms.IntegerField() 
    available = forms.BooleanField() 

Now to render this form we need to create the view and template which will be used to display the form to user. In mcatutorials/views.py, create a view

from django.shortcuts import render 
from .forms import McatutorialsForm 
  
# creating a home view 
def home_view(request): 
    context = {} 
    form = McatutorialsForm(request.POST or None) 
    context['form'] = form 
    return render(request, "home.html", context) 

and in templates/home.html,

< form method="POST"> 
    {% csrf_token %} 
    {{ form.as_p }} 
    < input type="submit" value="Submit"> 
< /form>

Now let’s display the form by running

Python manage.py runserver

visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/

As seen in above screenshot, there is a different type of input field for IntegerField, BooleanField, etc. One can modify this using the following ways.

One can override the default widget of each field for various purposes. The list of widgets can be seen here – Widgets | Django Documentation. To override the default widget we need to explicitly define the widget we want to assign to a field. Make following changes to mcatutorials/forms.py,

from django import forms 
  
class McatutorialsForm(forms.Form): 
    title = forms.CharField(widget = forms.Textarea) 
    description = forms.CharField(widget = forms.CheckboxInput) 
    views = forms.IntegerField(widget = forms.TextInput) 
    available = forms.BooleanField(widget = forms.Textarea) 

Now visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/,

Thus we can assign, any widget to any field using widget attribute. Note – The validations imposed on fields would still remain same, for example even if an IntegerField is made the same as CharField, it will only accept Integer inputs.

widgets have a great use in Form Fields especially using Select type of widgets where one wants to limit the type and number of inputs form a user. Let’s demonstrate this with help of modifying DateField. Consider forms.py as,

from django import forms 
  
class McatutorialsForm(forms.Form): 
    title = forms.CharField() 
    description = forms.CharField() 
    views = forms.IntegerField() 
    date = forms.DateField() 

By default, DateField as widget TextInput. It can be seen as

Now let’s change the widget for better and convenient input from user of a date. Add SelectDateWidget to DateField in forms.py,

from django import forms 
  
class McatutorialsForm(forms.Form): 
    title = forms.CharField() 
    description = forms.CharField() 
    views = forms.IntegerField() 
    date = forms.DateField(widget = forms.SelectDateWidget)

Now input of date can be seen as very easy and helpful in the front end of the application. This way we can use multiple widgets for modifying the input fields.