Accessing form fields as properties in a django view

Question

According to the Django tutorial, you should access form fields using cleaned_data dictionary. I\'m wondering why I can\'t access the properties of the form directly? My for

Answer 1

The way you define fields using django.forms is just a convenient, declarative syntax; it's not really representative of what the final Form class, or an instance of it, looks like in terms of attributes.

Forms have a metaclass (without getting too deep into it, a metaclass is to declaring a class using the class keyword as an __init__ method is to creating an instance of a class using parentheses -- a hook to customise the object being created, which in the case of a metaclass, is a class!) which picks off Fields from the form class at definition time and adds them to a base_fields dict. When you instantiate a form, its base_fields are deep-copied to a fields attribute on the instance.

One point of confusion might be that you use . to access fields for display in templates -- what's actually happening there is that Django's template engine first attempts to use dictionary-style [] access to resolve property lookups and the base form class defines a __getitem__ method to take advantage of this, looking up the appropriate field from the form instance's fields dict and wrapping it with a BoundField, a wrapper which knows how to use the field and data from the form for displaying the field.

Answer 2

You can access your field trought dict.

form.__dict__["fields"]["description"]

Answer 3

You can access the fields of a Form instance from its fields attribute.

myForm.fields['description']

And some property like label can be accessed like this:

myForm.fields['description'].label

Not sure how to display the value corresponding. Anybody having idea?

here is my reference

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/forms/api/#accessing-the-fields-from-the-form

Answer 4

If your form is validated then you can access myForm cleaned_data:

print myForm.cleaned_data.get('description')

If you want to see why you cannot access myForm.description then you can see the data dictionary of your myForm:

print myForm.__dict__