Question

I am trying to build custom django form for changing username and user email for an application. That’s why I need to pass the user details from the session to a form in order to check if the logged user exists. I am doing in this way:

in views.py

personal_info_form = PersonalInfoForm(prefix='personal_info',
                                      user_details=user_details)

where user_details is a dictionary:

'user_details': [{'username': u'username', 
                  'registration_date': datetime.date(2009, 10, 22), 
                  'id': 13, 'email': u'[e-mail]'}]}

In forms.py I have the following code:

class PersonalInfoForm(forms.Form):

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        user_details = kwargs.pop('user_details', None)
        super(PersonalInfoForm, self).__init__( *args, **kwargs)

    username = forms.CharField(required=True, initial=user_details[0]['username'])
    email = forms.EmailField(required=True)

And I get the following error:

name 'user_details' is not defined

I tried accessing it with self.user_details and only user_details and it gives me the same error

Answer 1

user_details is passed to __init__, so is not defined outside of it. That’s why you can’t access it when you’re instatiating that CharField object. Set initial in __init__ itself, after you’ve popped it from kwargs, for instance:

class PersonalInfoForm(forms.Form):

    username = forms.CharField(required=True)
    email = forms.EmailField(required=True)

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        user_details = kwargs.pop('user_details', None)
        super(PersonalInfoForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        if user_details:
            self.fields['username'].initial = user_details[0]['username']

When you get a chance, consider reading up on scopes in python.