Question

I’m trying to make a form for updating user accounts in Django that is autopopulated with the current account data for that particular user. I can do this with HTML, but would rather find a way to make it work using Django’s form system. I can’t use Django’s built-in user management due to certain constraints and am having to construct my own. I’m lost on where to start with this.

Answer 1

If you’re using a normal form (sublassing forms.Form), pass data in using the initial keyword argument to your form constructor:

# forms.py
class MyUserForm(forms.Form):
    username = forms.CharField(...
    first_name = forms.CharField(...
    ...

# views.py
if request.method == 'POST':
    # Process form
    form = MyUserForm(request.POST)
    ...
else:
    form = MyUserForm(initial={
        'username': request.user.username,
        'first_name': request.user.first_name,
        ...
    }
...

An even easier way, though, is using Django’s ModelForms. Something like:

# forms.py
class MyUserForm(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = User

# views.py
if request.method == 'POST':
    form = MyUserForm(request.POST, instance=request.user)
    ...
else:
    form = MyUserForm(instance=request.user)
...