Question

Take this very simple form for example:

class SearchForm(Form):
    q = forms.CharField(label='search')

This gets rendered in the template:

<input type="text" name="q" id="id_q" />

However, I want to add the placeholder attribute to this field with a value of Search so that the HTML would look something like:

<input type="text" name="q" id="id_q" placeholder="Search" />

Preferably I would like to pass the placeholder value in to CharField in the form class through a dictionary or something like:

q = forms.CharField(label='search', placeholder='Search')

What would be the best way to accomplish this?

Answer 1

Look at the widgets documentation. Basically it would look like:

q = forms.CharField(label='search', 
                    widget=forms.TextInput(attrs={'placeholder': 'Search'}))

More writing, yes, but the separation allows for better abstraction of more complicated cases.

You can also declare a widgets attribute containing a <field name> => <widget instance> mapping directly on the Meta of your ModelForm sub-class.