Question

I used this code previously it worked fine and i was suggested to use ModelForm by another member, it did make sense to use the form.is_valid() function etc.. so thought of giving it a try.

I went through some other examples on the internet but mine does not seem to work for some reason, or may be I am not doing it right, I get the following when I print the form in the view, and it goes to the else statement, so my form does not get saved

<input id="id_product" type="text" name="product" value="aassddf" maxlength="250" />
FAIL

My model.py

from django.db import models
from django.forms import ModelForm

class Category(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=250)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.name

class Product(models.Model):
    category = models.ForeignKey(Category)
    product = models.CharField(max_length=250)
    quantity = models.IntegerField(default=0)
    price = models.FloatField(default=0.0)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.product

class ProductForm(ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = Product

My views.py

from models import *
from django.shortcuts import render_to_response
from django.http import HttpResponseRedirect

def index(request):
    ...
    ...

def add_product(request):
    if request.method == 'POST':
        form = ProductForm(request.POST)
        print form['product']
        if form.is_valid():
            form.save()
            return HttpResponseRedirect('/product')
        else:
            print 'FAIL'
    return HttpResponseRedirect('/product')

My html

<form method="post" action="add_product/">
        {% csrf_token %}
        <label for="category">Category</label>
        <select name="category" id="category">
        {% for category in category_list %}
          <option> {{ category.name }} </option>
        {% endfor %}
        </select>

        <label for="product">Product</label>
        <input type="text" name="product" id="product">

        <label for="quantity">Quantitiy</label>
        <input type="text" name="quantity" id="quantity">

        <label for="price">Price</label>
        <input type="text" name="price" id="price">

        <input type="submit" value="Add New product" id="create">
    </form>

Is there a better way i could save the data, using ModelForms ??
Thanks in advance for the help.

Answer 1

Thanks to Daniel Roseman and Anuj Gupta I think I finally re-worked on my code on got it working in a standard way so it will generate the html form and validate errors.

So for anyone else who is trying to work django forms here is the code I worked on.

My model.py is was almost the same one i posted on the question but i removed

class ProductForm(ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = Product

I created a new form.py here is the code-

from django import forms
from models import Category

class ProductForm(forms.Form):
    # Put all my Categories into a select option
    category = forms.ModelChoiceField(queryset=Category.objects.all())
    product = forms.CharField()
    quantity = forms.IntegerField()
    price = forms.FloatField()  

My views.py changed had a lot of changes –

def add_product(request):
    success = False

    if request.method == "POST":        
        product_form = ProductForm(request.POST)

        if product_form.is_valid():             
            success = True

            category = Category.objects.get(name=product_form.cleaned_data['category'])
            product = product_form.cleaned_data['product']
            quantity = product_form.cleaned_data['quantity']
            price = product_form.cleaned_data['price']

            new_product = Product(category = category, product = product, quantity = quantity, price = price )
            new_product.save()

            new_product_form = ProductForm()

            ctx2 = {'success':success, 'product_form':new_product_form}
            return render_to_response('product/add_product.html', ctx2 , context_instance=RequestContext(request))
    else:
        product_form = ProductForm()
    ctx = {'product_form':product_form}
    return render_to_response('product/add_product.html', ctx , context_instance=RequestContext(request))

Finally in my html page i used {{ product_form.as_p }} so it created the forms dynamically

{% if success %}
    <h3> product added successfully </h3>
{% endif %}         
<form method="post" action=".">
    {% csrf_token %}

    {{ product_form.as_p }}

    <input type="submit" value="Add New product" id="create">
    <input type="reset" value="reset" id="reset">   
</form>

This may not be the perfect solution, but for a starter like me this sounds good, and at times you just get lost while reading the docs lol, hope it helps some one.

Cheers