Question

I think I am missing a key fundamental of how to use a ModelForm and Forms to save data in my database. I have a UserProfile model that is stores specific data that is not included in the User class

Models.py:

class UserProfile(models.Model):
    GRADE_YEAR_CHOICES = (
        ('FR', 'Freshman'),
        ('SO', 'Sophomore'),
        ('JR', 'Junior'),
        ('SR', 'Senior'),
        ('GR', 'Graduate')
    )

    school = models.CharField(max_length=64)
    grade_year = models.CharField(max_length=2, choices=GRADE_YEAR_CHOICES)
    gpa = models.DecimalField(decimal_places=2, max_digits=6, blank=True, null=True)
    user = models.ForeignKey(User, unique=True)

My Forms.py looks like:

class UserProfileForm(ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = UserProfile

The View for this looks like:

def more(request):
    if request.method == 'POST':
        form = UserProfileForm(request.POST)
        if form.is_valid():
            form = UserProfileForm(request.POST,
                school = form.cleaned_data['school'],
                grade_year = form.cleaned_data['grade_year'],
                gpa = form.cleaned_data['gpa'],
                user = form.cleaned_data['user']
            )
            form.save()
            return HttpResponseRedirect('/success')
    else:
        form = UserProfileForm()

        variables = RequestContext(request, {
            'form': form
        })
        return render_to_response('more.html', variables)

The form renders correctly with all of the fields from the model that I specified but when I try to save the data I get:

__init__() got an unexpected keyword argument 'grade_year'

What am I missing here? I realize that I might be missing a big concept so any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You are passing UserProfileForm a keyword argument that refers to your model fields which it isn’t expecting.

Simply call save() after the form is instantiated – if it had cleaned_data (i.e. the form is valid), then the POSTed fields are already mapped to the instance via ModelForm magic.

   if form.is_valid():
            form.save()