Question

I have written myself a form:

class Autopoweroff_Form(forms.Form):
    autopoweroff_groups = forms.CharField(required=True)
    autopoweroff_groups_hosts = forms.CharField(required=True)
    autopoweroff_groups_start = forms.CharField(required=True)
    autopoweroff_groups_end = forms.CharField(required=True)
    autopoweroff_groups_startup_delay = forms.CharField(required=True)
    autopoweroff_groups_idle_time = forms.CharField(required=True)

Now I know that I would not have to explicitly set reuqired=True but bear it for now please.
Anyways, let’s press on.

Now since I hate doing validation and so on in the view I just defined an update function for that form:

    def update(self, data):
        if not self.is_bound and data is not None:
            raise Exception()

        if self.is_valid():
            curr_group = self.cleaned_data['autopoweroff_groups']
            ...

and then in my view call it like so:

if request.method == 'POST':
        form = Autopoweroff_Form(data=request.POST)
        form.update(data=request.POST)
        return HttpResponseRedirect('/admin/thin/create_autopoweroff')
    else:
        form = Autopoweroff_Form()

    ...

Now the problem is that If I don’t type anything in the form the form is returned as is without displaying any errors like it ought to. I also know that it wont do anything because:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/ref/forms/validation/

In fact, Django will currently completely wipe out the cleaned_data dictionary if there are any errors in the form. However, this behavior may change in the future, so it’s not > a bad idea to clean up after yourself in the first place.

if i try:

def update(self, data):
        if not self.is_bound and data is not None:
            raise Exception()

        if self.is_valid():
            curr_group = self.cleaned_data['autopoweroff_groups']
            ...
        else:
            print self.errors

I get the errors that I would have liked to see in the template.
I also already tried:

def clean_autopoweroff_groups(self):
        autopoweoff_groups = self.cleaned_data.get('autopoweroff_groups', "")
        if autopoweoff_groups == '':
            print "Validation Error"
            raise forms.ValidationError('Please Enter A Name')
        return autopoweroff_groups

What exactly am I doing wrong?

UPDATE:
in my view:

    if request.method == 'POST':
        form = Autopoweroff_Form(data=request.POST)

        if form.is_valid():
            form.update(data=request.POST)
            return HttpResponseRedirect('/admin/thin/create_autopoweroff')
    else:
        form = Autopoweroff_Form()

and in my form remove if self.is_valid()

Answer 1

Django has build in validation so you don’t need to rewrite it:

class Autopoweroff_Form(forms.Form):
    # I suggest not prefixing your fields with the name of the class
    groups = forms.CharField(required=True)
    hosts = forms.CharField(required=True)
    start = forms.CharField(required=True)
    end = forms.CharField(required=True)
    delay = forms.CharField(required=True)
    idle_time = forms.CharField(required=True)

and in your view:

if request.method == 'POST':
    form = Autopoweroff_Form(data=request.POST)
    if form.is_valid():
        return HttpResponseRedirect('/admin/thin/create_autopoweroff')
else:
    form = Autopoweroff_Form()

note that you call is_valid() in the view, not the form.

If you want to perform so more complicated validation on either individidual fields or on a grouping of fields, you can overwrite the forms clean() and clean_[field_name]() methods.

See here:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/forms/validation/#cleaning-a-specific-field-attribute