CODEWITHSUNDEEP
djangodjango-forms
emmby
emmby

Reputation: 100462

Adding an attribute to the <input> tag for a django ModelForm field

I have a django model that I'm displaying as a form using a ModelForm. The defaults work very well for me for the most part.

However, I would like my html <input ...> tags to have one additional attribute, namely I would like to include a placeholder attribute, like the following:

<input placeholder="{{field.label}}" ... />

What is the easiest way to add this attribute to my html? As far as I can tell it appears I need to implement my own filter to output the field, but this seems like overkill when all i want to do is leave everything alone but add one additional attribute.

Upvotes: 23

Views: 17310

Answers (3)

David
David

Reputation: 1198

Here is a reusable mixin for Form classes based on @Mark's method

from django.core.exceptions import ImproperlyConfigured

class PlaceholderMixin():
    def placeholder_setup(self):
        if not hasattr(self.Meta, 'placeholders'):
            raise ImproperlyConfigured('Meta class must have a placeholders dict')
        for field, placeholder in self.Meta.placeholders.items():
            self.fields[field].widget.attrs['placeholder'] = placeholder

To use it, add it to a Form class and define placeholders in the Meta class:

class MyForm(forms.ModelForm, PlaceholderMixin):
    class Meta:
        model = MyModel
        fields = [ 'name', 'description', 'choices' ]
        placeholders = {
            'name': 'your name',
            'description': 'describe yourself'
        }
        
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self.placeholder_setup()

Upvotes: 0

Josh Smeaton
Josh Smeaton

Reputation: 48730

See the documentation 

class AuthorForm(ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = Author
        widgets = {
            'name': TextInput(attrs={'placeholder': 'name'}),
        }

You could always create your own widget that derives from TextInput and includes the placeholder attribute, and use the widgets dictionary to simply map fields to your new widget without specifying the placeholder attribute for every field.

Upvotes: 34

Mark
Mark

Reputation: 19997

Personally I prefer to use this method:

def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
    super(MyForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
    self.fields['email'].widget.attrs['placeholder'] = self.fields['email'].label or '[email protected]'

It required more code if you don't have __init__ yet, but you don't need to specify the widget.

Upvotes: 20

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