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Fields Types in Forms

Besides the CharField and IntegerField classes seen in the previous section, you will probably make use of the following field types.

Boolean​

Implemented by the django.forms.BooleanField class. By default the HTML code generates a checkbox. The value received in form.cleaned_data is a bool object.

Example:

class CourseForm(forms.Form):
    name = forms.CharField(label="Name", max_length=128)
    enrolled_students = forms.IntegerField(label="Students")
    companies_only = forms.BooleanField(label="Companies only?", required=False)

Note that required=False is necessary to allow the field to be empty, in which case the value of the field will be False. This definition renders the following form:

Boolean Field

Options list​

Implemented by the django.forms.ChoiceField class. By default the generated HTML code is a select tag. Each of the options in this list is represented by a tuple: the first element indicates the value that the form will receive for each selected element, while the second is the text that will be shown to the user.

Example:

class CourseForm(forms.Form):
    name = forms.CharField(label="Name", max_length=128)
    enrolled_students = forms.IntegerField(label="Students")
    TIMES_OF_DAY = (
        (1, "Morning"),
        (2, "Afternoon"),
        (3, "Evening")
    )
    time = forms.ChoiceField(label="Time", choices=TIMES_OF_DAY)

Renders the following form:

Options list

If the user selects "Morning", form.cleaned_data["time"] will be 1, since it is the value defined in the tuple passed to the choices parameter; if "Afternoon" gets selected, it will be 2; and so on.

Date​

Implemented by the django.forms.DateField class. By default the generated HTML code is the same as for django.forms.CharField (a text box). The difference is that this field will validate that the date is entered in the correct format, and the data type of the field value in form.cleaned_data will be datetime.date.

Example:

class CourseForm(forms.Form):
    name = forms.CharField(label="Name", max_length=128)
    enrolled_students = forms.IntegerField(label="Students")
    start_date = forms.DateField(
        label="Start date",
        input_formats=["%d/%m/%Y"]
    )

We are stating that that the input format must be %d/%m/%Y, that is, dd/mm/yyyy. You can find the possible formats in the datetime standard module documentation.

With the following addition you make browsers that support HTML5 display a calendar to select the date:

    start_date = forms.DateField(
        label="Start date",
        widget=forms.DateInput(attrs={"type": "date"})
    )

Note that in this case we removed the input format specification, since the format established by the HTML5 standard will be used. For a full explanation, see Date Field With Calendar Widget in Django Forms.

And this is the result:

Date Field

You might also want to take a look at the full list of fields provided by Django.