Django set field value after a form is initialized

user_889 0
Viewed 175591

I am trying to set the field to a certain value after the form is initialized.

For example, I have the following class.

class CustomForm(forms.Form):
    Email = forms.EmailField(min_length=1, max_length=200)

In the view, I want to be able to do something like this:

form = CustomForm()
form["Email"] = GetEmailString()

return HttpResponse(t.render(c))
django
9 Answers

Since you're not passing in POST data, I'll assume that what you are trying to do is set an initial value that will be displayed in the form. The way you do this is with the initial keyword.

form = CustomForm(initial={'Email': GetEmailString()})

See the Django Form docs for more explanation.

If you are trying to change a value after the form was submitted, you can use something like:

if form.is_valid():
    form.cleaned_data['Email'] = GetEmailString()

Check the referenced docs above for more on using cleaned_data

user_980870

Something like Nigel Cohen's would work if you were adding data to a copy of the collected set of form data:

form = FormType(request.POST)
if request.method == "POST":
    formcopy = form(request.POST.copy())
    formcopy.data['Email'] = GetEmailString()
user_29175230

If you have initialized the form like this

form = CustomForm()

then the correct way as of Jan 2019, is to use .initial to replace the data. This will replace the data in the intial dict that goes along with the form. It also works if you have initialized using some instance such as form = CustomForm(instance=instance)

To replace data in the form, you need to

form.initial['Email'] = GetEmailString()

Generalizing this it would be,

form.initial['field_name'] = new_value
user_67400360

To throw yet another way into the mix: this works too, with a bit more modern notation. It just works around the fact that a QueryDict is immutable.

>>> the_form.data = {**f.data.dict(), 'some_field': 47}
>>> the_form['some_field'].as_widget()
'<input type="hidden" name="some_field" value="47"
        class="field-some_field" id="id_some_field">'
user_8753790

in widget use 'value' attr. Example:

username = forms.CharField(
    required=False,
    widget=forms.TextInput(attrs={'readonly': True, 'value': 'CONSTANT_VALUE'}),
)
user_107125250
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