Question

I’m using Twitter Bootstrap with Django to render forms.

Bootstrap can format your forms quite nicely – as long as you have the CSS classes it expects included.

However, my issue is that the forms generated by Django’s {{ form.as_p }} don’t render well with Bootstrap, as they don’t have these classes.

For example, the output from Django:

    <form class="horizontal-form" action="/contact/" method="post">
        <div style='display:none'>
            <input type='hidden' name='csrfmiddlewaretoken' 
                   value='26c39ab41e38cf6061367750ea8c2ea8'/>
        </div>
        <p><label for="id_name">Name:</label> <input id="id_name" type="text" name="name" value="FOOBAR" maxlength="20" /></p>
        <p><label for="id_directory">Directory:</label> <input id="id_directory" type="text" name="directory" value="FOOBAR" maxlength="60" /></p>
       <p><label for="id_comment">Comment:</label> <textarea id="id_comment" rows="10" cols="40" name="comment">Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet.</textarea></p>
       <p>
           <label for="id_server">Server:</label>
           <select name="server" id="id_server">
               <option value="">---------</option>
               <option value="1" 
                   selected="selected">sydeqexcd01.au.db.com</option>
               <option value="2">server1</option>
               <option value="3">server2</option>
               <option value="4">server3</option>
           </select>
       </p>
       <input type="submit" value="Submit" />
    </form>

From what I can tell, Bootstrap requires that your forms has a <fieldset class="control-group">, each <label> has class="control-label", and each <input> is wrapped in a <div>:

<fieldset class="control-group">
    <label class="control-label" for="input01">Text input</label>
    <div class="controls">
        <input type="text" class="xlarge" name="input01">
        <p class="help-text">Help text here. Be sure to fill this out like so, or else!</p>
    </div>
</fieldset>

However, adding custom CSS labels to every form field in Django is rather painful:

Add class to Django label_tag() output

Is there a smarter way of either using {{ form.as_p }}, or iterating through the fields, without having to manually specify things, or do a whole bunch of hackery?

Cheers,
Victor

Answer 1

I like to use “django-crispy-forms” which is the successor to django-uni-form. It’s a great little API and has great support for Bootstrap.

I tend to use the template filters for quickly porting old code and quick forms, and the template tags when I need more control over the rendering.