Question

I have a page, index.html, that contains both a login and registration form. I have a couple of questions about getting this to work properly

My URLConfig looks like this:

urlpatterns = patterns('djangoproject1.authentication.views',
    (r'^$',direct_to_template,{'template':'authentication/index.html'}),
    (r'^register/$','register'),
)

1) Using the Django book is a guide, my form looks like this:

<h1>Register</h1>
    <form action="/register/" method="post">
        {{ form.as_p }}
        <input type="submit" value="Register">
    </form>

Of course, since the file is index.html, the form doesn’t appear when I just go to the page. Do I need a “view” to handle visiting index.html rather than a direct_to_template?

2) My Register code looks like this:

def register(request):
    if request.method == 'POST':
        form = UserCreationForm(request.POST)
        if form.is_valid():
            new_user = form.save()
            return HttpResponseRedirect("/register/success/")
        else:
            form = UserCreationForm()
    return render_to_response("authentication/index.html", {'form': form})

This is the django authentication built-in stuff. Do people actually use it? It seems limited. I know I can add more fields to the Django User by using a user profile or something, but what about the UserCreationForm? Should I roll my own form? Should it inherit from UserCreationForm somehow?

Answer 1

direct_to_template by itself can neither produce nor handle forms — it simply renders a request directly to a template, as its name describes.

You might look into django-registration for registration.

If you’re putting two forms on the same page, you’ll need a custom view that is capable of rendering and handling both forms, though multi-form pages are notoriously tricky to work with properly. If you have separate forms (and submit buttons), you can add a unique name to each submit input and determine which form (class) to validate and handle based on if name in request.POST.

---

edit:

After looking more closely at your code, I see that your registration form redirects to a different view; that simplifies things, but you’ll still need a custom view for your home page that passes both login and registration forms to the template for rendering.

Alternatively, if you’re simply redirecting to pages that handle each form, you can add those forms using direct_to_template‘s extra_context parameter directly in your urls.py:

from wherever import LoginForm, RegistrationForm

urlpatterns = patterns('djangoproject1.authentication.views',
    (r'^$',
        direct_to_template,
        {
            'template': 'authentication/index.html',
            'extra_context': {
                'reg_form': RegistrationForm(),
                'login_form': LoginForm()
            }
        }
    ),
    (r'^register/$', 'register'),
)

This approach isn’t the cleanest, but it’s an option if you really wanted to use generic views.