Django's basic tutorial is great to get started, but once you get into the nitty gritty I find myself often going to stacks rather than the docs to get the information I need because the docs get kinda sparse.
One example is if you want to forgo modelforms and pass the information from the forms to the model manually through your view (for example because you want to manipulate the information before passing it to the database). I couldn't find anything in the tutorial that gave clear instructions on this and had to go to stacks to find an example. Maybe the solution is simple and obvious for most experienced programmers, but ordinarily the django tutorial explains things clearly so even newbees like me can get into it so it was disappointing that this was not done in this instance.
Another example is sessions, here is the sessions in the official django docs -
it's great on how to configure and set up sessions, but as soon as you get to how you use sessions in views it gets vague, confusing and way too sparse for what its trying to explain. I didn't know how to use sessions after reading it.
I would definitely agree with that, the first we program I tried to work with was PHP and I think I might have given up on programming altogether had I not discovered django with it's much better documentation.
I appreciate what they have done and appreciate the time and effort the Django team put into their documentation, but more is always better and I think other independent contributions on how to use django are also needed, especially since most of the published books you can find on how to use django are out of date
You should consider contributing to the docs if there are things you think could be clearer or more thorough. It's a great way to get your feet wet in OSS, and really helps the next person.
you reference the model in the view and then tell the view to save it directly to the model using the "model = form field" type syntax to assign value and then .save() method to save.
In the form field you are saving from, you write the form field value and then an empty space where the input value goes sort of like "form.cleaned_data.get("field name", " "). The second blank ""is the empty space where the field value goes. The claned_data is django's internal form validator. That sounds confusing so I'll give an example
This is what your views would look like
from django.shortcuts import render
from sample.models import Test
from sample.forms import TestForm
def Example(request):
if request.method == 'POST':
form = TestForm(request.POST)
if form.is_valid():
testmodel = Test()
testmodel.modelfield1 = form.cleaned_data.get('formfield1','')
testmodel.modelfield2 = form.cleaned_data.get('formfield2','')
testmodel.save()
return render(request, 'sample/nextpage.html')
else:
form =TestForm
context_data = {'form':form}
return render(request, 'sample/testformpage.html', context_data)
"The second blank ""is the empty space where the field value goes."
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here, but I don't think this is right. cleaned_data is a dictionary, and so the second argument to get is a default value to use if there is no value corresponding to the key. So, in your example, if there's no value for "formfield1" in cleaned_data, it would return a string with a space in.
This is probably not what you want to do. cleaned_data will always contain values for declared form fields, so the only way the default would be used is if you've made a mistake in specifying the key (for instance, if there's a typo and you've written 'formfeild1' instead of 'formfield1'). If you've made that kind of mistake, you don't want the program to continue using a single space instead of the valid data (you'll lose data) - you want the program to report that there's something wrong.
So I think you should probably use
form.cleaned_data['formfield1']
which will do the same thing if formfield1 is a real field name specified in the form, but will raise an exception if it isn't.
Sorry typo, it should be the second blank is the empty space where the user input goes.
I just tried your solution with cleaned_data["formfield1"] instead of cleaned_data("formfield1","") and it didn't work for me, it came back with the following error message when I submitted the form:
>'builtin_function_or_method' object is not subscriptable
I think you have to have the empty quotes after the form field and I think that's what's capturing the user input
so here "form.cleaned_data("formfield1","") seems to be telling django the form name and then the second field is where the associated user input goes which is then passed to the model.
Alternative is to use the modelform but not save the created/updated model automatically. Then you modify the resulting model object and save it manually as needed.
Works also with models with m2m fields with Form.save_m2m().
One example is if you want to forgo modelforms and pass the information from the forms to the model manually through your view (for example because you want to manipulate the information before passing it to the database). I couldn't find anything in the tutorial that gave clear instructions on this and had to go to stacks to find an example. Maybe the solution is simple and obvious for most experienced programmers, but ordinarily the django tutorial explains things clearly so even newbees like me can get into it so it was disappointing that this was not done in this instance.
Another example is sessions, here is the sessions in the official django docs -
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/topics/http/sessions/
it's great on how to configure and set up sessions, but as soon as you get to how you use sessions in views it gets vague, confusing and way too sparse for what its trying to explain. I didn't know how to use sessions after reading it.