Accessing form data in routes in Flask - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Accessing form data in routes

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple web app where users can submit their favorite fruit through a form.

🎯 Goal: Create a Flask app that receives form data from a POST request and extracts the submitted fruit name in the route.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a Flask app with a route to display a form

Add a form with a single input named 'fruit'

Create a POST route to receive the form submission

Access the form data in the route using Flask's request object

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Web apps often need to collect user input through forms and process it on the server.

💼 Career

Understanding how to access form data in routes is essential for backend web development with Flask.

1

Set up Flask app and form route

Write code to import Flask and create an app instance called app. Then define a route / that returns a simple HTML form with a single input named fruit and a submit button.

Flask

from flask import Flask

app = Flask(__name__)

# Define route '/' to return a form with input named 'fruit'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Remember to import Flask and create the app instance. The form should use POST method and have an input named 'fruit'.

2

Add POST route to receive form data

Add a new route /submit that accepts only POST requests. Import request from Flask to access form data.

Flask

from flask import Flask, request

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/')
def index():
    return '''
    
      Favorite fruit:
      
      Submit
    
    '''

# Add POST route '/submit' here
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use @app.route with methods=['POST'] to create the POST route.

3

Access the form data in the POST route

Inside the submit function, use request.form to get the value of the input named fruit and store it in a variable called fruit_name.

Flask

from flask import Flask, request

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/')
def index():
    return '''
    
      Favorite fruit:
      
      Submit
    
    '''

@app.route('/submit', methods=['POST'])
def submit():
    # Get the form data for 'fruit'
    # Your code here

Need a hint?

Use request.form['fruit'] to get the submitted fruit value.

4

Return a response showing the submitted fruit

Complete the submit function by returning a string that says "You submitted: " followed by the value of fruit_name.

Flask

from flask import Flask, request

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/')
def index():
    return '''
    
      Favorite fruit:
      
      Submit
    
    '''

@app.route('/submit', methods=['POST'])
def submit():
    fruit_name = request.form['fruit']
    # Return a response showing the submitted fruit
    # Your code here

Need a hint?

Use an f-string to include fruit_name in the returned string.