How do I add a placeholder on a CharField in Django?

Question

Take this very simple form for example:

class SearchForm(Form):
    q = forms.CharField(label=\'search\')

This gets rendered in the templat

Answer 1

For a ModelForm, you can use the Meta class thus:

from django import forms

from .models import MyModel

class MyModelForm(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = MyModel
        widgets = {
            'name': forms.TextInput(attrs={'placeholder': 'Name'}),
            'description': forms.Textarea(
                attrs={'placeholder': 'Enter description here'}),
        }

Answer 2

Look at the widgets documentation. Basically it would look like:

q = forms.CharField(label='search', 
                    widget=forms.TextInput(attrs={'placeholder': 'Search'}))

More writing, yes, but the separation allows for better abstraction of more complicated cases.

You can also declare a widgets attribute containing a <field name> => <widget instance> mapping directly on the Meta of your ModelForm sub-class.

Answer 3

The other methods are all good. However, if you prefer to not specify the field (e.g. for some dynamic method), you can use this:

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

It also allows the placeholder to depend on the instance for ModelForms with instance specified.

Answer 4

It's undesirable to have to know how to instantiate a widget when you just want to override its placeholder.

    q = forms.CharField(label='search')
    ...
    q.widget.attrs['placeholder'] = "Search"

Answer 5

class FormClass(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = Book
        fields = '__all__'
        widgets = {
            'field_name': forms.TextInput(attrs={'placeholder': 'Type placeholder text here..'}),
        }

Answer 6

You can use this code to add placeholder attr for every TextInput field in you form. Text for placeholders will be taken from model field labels.

class PlaceholderDemoForm(forms.ModelForm):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(PlaceholderDemoForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        for field_name in self.fields:
            field = self.fields.get(field_name)  
            if field:
                if type(field.widget) in (forms.TextInput, forms.DateInput):
                    field.widget = forms.TextInput(attrs={'placeholder': field.label})

    class Meta:
        model = DemoModel