European date input in Django Admin

Question

Django has a DATE_FORMAT and a DATE_TIME_FORMAT options that allow us to choose which format to use when viewing dates, but doesn\'t apparently let me change the input forma

Answer 1

I've modified settings so that it disables l10n and set date format explicite:

USE_L10N = False
DATE_FORMAT = 'd-m-Y'
DATETIME_FORMAT = 'd-m-Y H:i'

You can set DATE_INPUT_FORMATS as well.

Answer 2

just beware not to write it as a string but as a tuple. eg:

DATE_INPUT_FORMATS = ('%d.%m.%Y',) 

if you want to have only one valid way of writing date in a form.

Answer 3

You have to do this yourself for now, but it's quite easy to do with a custom form field class that sets the input_formats argument of DateField. This should do it:

class MyDateField(forms.DateField):
  def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
    kwargs.setdefault('input_formats', ("%d-%m-%Y",))
    super(MyDateField, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)

Note that input_formats is a list, so you can specify multiple possibilities and it will try them in order when parsing user input.

Answer 4

There is an official way to do this now since the closing of Django ticket 6483 & release of Django 1.2.

If you have USE_L10N set to False, what you should do is specify the DATE_INPUT_FORMATS and DATETIME_INPUT_FORMATS in your settings.py. Here are the settings I use for this, based on converting the defaults:

#dd/mm/yyyy and dd/mm/yy date & datetime input field settings
DATE_INPUT_FORMATS = ('%d-%m-%Y', '%d/%m/%Y', '%d/%m/%y', '%d %b %Y',
                      '%d %b, %Y', '%d %b %Y', '%d %b, %Y', '%d %B, %Y',
                      '%d %B %Y')
DATETIME_INPUT_FORMATS = ('%d/%m/%Y %H:%M:%S', '%d/%m/%Y %H:%M', '%d/%m/%Y',
                          '%d/%m/%y %H:%M:%S', '%d/%m/%y %H:%M', '%d/%m/%y',
                          '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S', '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M', '%Y-%m-%d')

If you have USE_L10N set to True, then you will need to use the FORMAT_MODULE_PATH instead.

For example, my LANGUAGE_CODE is set to en-au, my site is called golf, and my FORMAT_MODULE_PATH is set to golf.formats, so my directory structure looks like this:

golf/
    settings.py
    ...
    formats/
        __init__.py
        en/
            __init__.py
            formats.py

and the DATE_INPUT_FORMATS and DATETIME_INPUT_FORMATS settings are in formats.py instead of settings.py.

Answer 5

Looks like this is not yet supported, as I understand it, so yes, you'll have to do some custom work for now.

Answer 6

Based on this idea I made new db.fields class EuDateField:

mydbfields.py

from django import forms
from django.forms.fields import DEFAULT_DATE_INPUT_FORMATS
from django.db import models

class EuDateFormField(forms.DateField):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        kwargs.update({'input_formats': ("%d.%m.%Y",)+DEFAULT_DATE_INPUT_FORMATS})
        super(EuDateFormField, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)

class EuDateField(models.DateField):
    def formfield(self, **kwargs):
        kwargs.update({'form_class': EuDateFormField})
        return super(EuDateField, self).formfield(**kwargs)

Note that it adds my format (e.g. 31.12.2007) to existing "standard" django formats at first place.

Usage:

from mydbfields import EuDateField
class Person(models.Model):
    ...
    birthday   = EuDateField("Birthday", null=True, blank=True, help_text="")

In my case this renders good in admin, but most probably will in ModelForm too (haven't tried it).

My django version is:

>>> import django
>>> django.get_version()
u'1.1 alpha 1 SVN-10105'