Question

In Django, how do I associate a Form with a Model so that data entered into the form are inserted into the database table associated with the Model? How do I save that user input to that database table?

For example:

class PhoneNumber(models.Model):
    FirstName = models.CharField(max_length=30)
    LastName = models.CharField(max_length=30)
    PhoneNumber = models.CharField(max_length=20)

class PhoneNumber(forms.Form):
    FirstName = forms.CharField(max_length=30)
    LastName = forms.CharField(max_length=30)
    PhoneNumber = forms.CharField(max_length=20)

I know there is a class for creating a form from the the model, but even there I’m unclear on how the data actually gets to the database. And I’d like to understand the inner workings before I move on to the time-savers. If there is a simple example of how this works in the docs, I’ve missed it.

Thanks.

UPDATED:
To be clear — I do know about the ModelForm tool, I’m trying to figure out how to do this without that — in part so I can better understand what it’s doing in the first place.

ANSWERED:

With the help of the anwers, I arrived at this solution:

Form definition:

class ThisForm(forms.Form)
    [various Field assignments]

    model = ThisModel()

Code in views to save entered data to database:

if request_method == 'POST':
    form = ThisForm(request.POST)
    if form.is_valid():
        for key, value in form.cleaned_data.items():
            setattr(form.model, key, value)
        form.model.save(form.model)

After this the data entered in the browser form was in the database table.

Note that the call of the model’s save() method required passage of the model itself as an argument. I have no idea why.

CAVEAT: I’m a newbie. This succeeded in getting data from a browser to a database table, but God only knows what I’ve neglected or missed or outright broken along the way. ModelForm definitely seems like a much cleaner solution.

Answer 1

Back when I first used Forms and Models (without using ModelForm), what I remember doing was checking if the form was valid, which would set your cleaned data, manually moving the data from the form to the model (or whatever other processing you want to do), and then saving the model. As you can tell, this was extremely tedious when your form exactly (or even closely) matches your model. By using the ModelForm (since you said you weren’t quite sure how it worked), when you save the ModelForm, it instantiates an object with the form data according to the model spec and then saves that model for you. So all-in-all, the flow of data goes from the HTML form, to the Django Form, to the Django Model, to the DB.

Some actual code for your questions:

To get the browser form data into the form object:

if request.method == 'POST':
    form = SomeForm(request.POST)
    if form.is_valid():
        model.attr = form.cleaned_data['attr']
        model.attr2 = form.cleaned_data['attr2']
        model.save()
else:
    form = SomeForm()
return render_to_response('page.html', {'form': form, })

In the template page you can do things like this with the form:

<form method="POST">
{{ form.as_p }}
<input type="submit"/>
</form>

That’s just one example that I pulled from here.