Django form not calling clean_

Question

I am attempting to validate a form (and it used to work before). For some reason, I can\'t seem to get the various cleaning functions such as clean_username(self) to get called

Answer 1

I discovered the source of the error after diving into the Django forms.py source.

It seems that if a field is left blank, the form raises a ValidationError for that field after calling field.clean(), but it then does not call clean_<fieldname>, but it still calls the main clean method of the class. In order to deal with a clean method that uses those blank fields you have to do the following:

def clean(self):
    try:
        password = self.cleaned_data['password']
        # etc
    except KeyError:
        raise ValidationError('The password field was blank.')

    return self.cleaned_data

Answer 2

You can override this by using required=False in your field constructors.

username = forms.CharField(max_length=30, required=False)
password = forms.CharField(max_length=30,widget=forms.PasswordInput, required=False)

This seems illogical for your example, but can be useful if other instances