Adding an attribute to the <input> tag for a django ModelForm field

Question

I have a django model that I\'m displaying as a form using a ModelForm. The defaults work very well for me for the most part.

However, I would like my html

Answer 1

Slight change to @josh-smeaton 's answer.

class AuthorForm(ModelForm):
class Meta:
    model = Author
    widgets = {
        'name': forms.TextInput(attrs={'placeholder': 'name'}),
    }

Without the "forms." in front of TextInput a NameError would be raised.

Django Ver 2.0.1

Answer 2

Personally I prefer to use this method:

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 required more code if you don't have __init__ yet, but you don't need to specify the widget.

Answer 3

See the documentation

class AuthorForm(ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = Author
        widgets = {
            'name': TextInput(attrs={'placeholder': 'name'}),
        }

You could always create your own widget that derives from TextInput and includes the placeholder attribute, and use the widgets dictionary to simply map fields to your new widget without specifying the placeholder attribute for every field.