Displaying forms in templates in Django - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Displaying Forms in Django Templates

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple web page where users can submit their contact information using a form. You want to display this form on a webpage using Django templates.

🎯 Goal: Create a Django form in Python, configure it in your view, and display it properly in an HTML template.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a Django form class with fields for name and email

Create a view function that creates an instance of this form

Pass the form instance to the template context

Display the form in the template using Django template syntax

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Forms are essential for collecting user input on websites, such as contact forms, registration forms, and surveys.

💼 Career

Understanding how to display and handle forms in Django is a key skill for backend web developers working with Python and Django.

1

Create a Django form class

Create a Django form class called ContactForm in forms.py with two fields: name as a CharField and email as an EmailField.

Django

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use forms.Form as the base class. Add name and email fields using forms.CharField() and forms.EmailField().

2

Create a view function with the form instance

In views.py, create a function called contact_view that creates an instance of ContactForm and stores it in a variable called form.

Django

from django import forms

class ContactForm(forms.Form):
    name = forms.CharField()
    email = forms.EmailField()

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Define a function contact_view that takes request as a parameter. Inside, create form = ContactForm().

3

Pass the form to the template context

In the contact_view function, return a call to render with request, template name 'contact.html', and a context dictionary containing the key 'form' with the value form.

Django

from django import forms
from django.shortcuts import render

class ContactForm(forms.Form):
    name = forms.CharField()
    email = forms.EmailField()

def contact_view(request):
    form = ContactForm()
    # Your code here

Need a hint?

Use return render(request, 'contact.html', {'form': form}) to send the form to the template.

4

Display the form in the template

In the contact.html template, add the HTML code to display the form using Django template syntax: use {% csrf_token %} inside the <form> tag and display the form fields with {{ form.as_p }}. The form should use method post.

Django

from django import forms
from django.shortcuts import render

class ContactForm(forms.Form):
    name = forms.CharField()
    email = forms.EmailField()

def contact_view(request):
    form = ContactForm()
    return render(request, 'contact.html', {'form': form})

Need a hint?

Use a <form method="post"> tag, include {% csrf_token %} for security, display the form fields with {{ form.as_p }}, and add a submit button.