Home/ Questions/Q 6815429
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-26T20:48:22+00:00

I have several related questions and post under one topic for clarity’s sake. #

  • 0

I have several related questions and post under one topic for clarity’s sake.

# Django/django_bookmarks/urls.py    
urlpatterns = patterns('',
    (r'^$', main_page),
    (r'^user/(\w+)/$', user_page),
    (r'^login/$', 'django.contrib.auth.views.login'),
)    

# login.html
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Django Bookmarks - User Login</title>
  </head>

  <body>
    <h1>User Login</h1>
    {% if form.errors %}
    <p>Your username and password didn't match.
      Please try again.</p>
    {% endif %}
    <form method="post" action=".">
      {% csrf_token %}
      <p><label for="id_username">Username:</label>
    {{ form.username }}</p>
      <p><label for="id_password">Password:</label>
    {{ form.password }}</p>
      <input type="hidden" name="next" value="/" />
      <input type="submit" value="login" />
    </form>
  </body>
</html>

Based on the book, the login.html uses form.has_errors instead of form.errors. However, the form.has_errors doesn’t print any warning message even if I enter a wrong user/password. After some investigation, I change it to form.errors and it works for me.

Question 1> Which one should be used form.errors or form.has_errors?

Question 2> If form.has_errors doesn’t work, why django doesn’t complain in the first place. The book was written for Django 1.0 and I am using Django 1.3. Is that the reason?

Question 3> How to check which attributes the form has? I have tried the following and it doesn’t give the information I needed.

python manage.py shell
Python 2.7.1+ (r271:86832, Apr 11 2011, 18:05:24) 
[GCC 4.5.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
(InteractiveConsole)
>>> import django.contrib.auth.views
>>> dir(django.contrib.auth.views)
['AuthenticationForm', 'HttpResponseRedirect', 'PasswordChangeForm', 'PasswordResetForm', 'QueryDict', 'REDIRECT_FIELD_NAME', 'RequestContext', 'SetPasswordForm', 'User', '_', '__builtins__', '__doc__', '__file__', '__name__', '__package__', 'auth_login', 'auth_logout', 'base36_to_int', 'csrf_protect', 'default_token_generator', 'get_current_site', 'login', 'login_required', 'logout', 'logout_then_login', 'never_cache', 'password_change', 'password_change_done', 'password_reset', 'password_reset_complete', 'password_reset_confirm', 'password_reset_done', 'redirect_to_login', 'render_to_response', 'reverse', 'settings', 'urlparse']
>>>
>>> dir(django.contrib.auth.views.login)
['__call__', '__class__', '__closure__', '__code__', '__defaults__', '__delattr__', '__dict__', '__doc__', '__format__', '__get__', '__getattribute__', '__globals__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__module__', '__name__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__str__', '__subclasshook__', 'func_closure', 'func_code', 'func_defaults', 'func_dict', 'func_doc', 'func_globals', 'func_name']

Question 4> When the following statement is needed?

{% csrf_token %}

Thank you

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    form.has_errors is not documented in the forms api. I did a quick grep of the source code, and I could not find it in either Django 1.3 or my svn checkout of the 1.0.X branch. It seems that it’s a mistake in the book you are using.

    Checking form.errors in your template is fine.

    If you tried to access form.has_errors in the view, you would get an AttributeError. However Django does not complain when try to access an variable that does not exist in the template, so {{ form.has_errors }} fails silently. See the docs on template variables for more info.

    To introspect the attributes on the form, use dir on the form object, not the view.

    >>> from django.contrib.auth.views import AuthenticationForm
>>> dir(AuthenticationForm)

    However I recommend you explore the form api docs instead.

    The csrf token is required when you are using Django’s cross site request forgery protection.

    • 0