Django v1.0 documentation

Widgets

A widget is Django’s representation of a HTML input element. The widget handles the rendering of the HTML, and the extraction of data from a GET/POST dictionary that corresponds to the widget.

Django provides a representation of all the basic HTML widgets, plus some commonly used groups of widgets:

class TextInput
Text input: <input type='text' ...>
class PasswordInput
Password input: <input type='password' ...>
class HiddenInput
Hidden input: <input type='hidden' ...>
class MultipleHiddenInput
Multiple <input type='hidden' ...> widgets.
class FileInput
File upload input: <input type='file' ...>
class DateTimeInput
New in Django 1.0.

Date/time input as a simple text box: <input type='text' ...>

class Textarea
Text area: <textarea>...</textarea>
class CheckboxInput
Checkbox: <input type='checkbox' ...>
class Select
Select widget: <select><option ...>...</select>
class NullBooleanSelect
Select widget with options ‘Unknown’, ‘Yes’ and ‘No’
class SelectMultiple
Select widget allowing multiple selection: <select multiple='multiple'>...</select>
class RadioSelect

A list of radio buttons:

<ul>
  <li><input type='radio' ...></li>
  ...
</ul>
class CheckboxSelectMultiple

A list of checkboxes:

<ul>
  <li><input type='checkbox' ...></li>
  ...
</ul>
class MultiWidget
Wrapper around multiple other widgets
class SplitDateTimeWidget
Wrapper around two TextInput widgets: one for the date, and one for the time.

Specifying widgets

Form.widget

Whenever you specify a field on a form, Django will use a default widget that is appropriate to the type of data that is to be displayed. To find which widget is used on which field, see the documentation for the built-in Field classes.

However, if you want to use a different widget for a field, you can - just use the 'widget' argument on the field definition. For example:

class CommentForm(forms.Form):
    name = forms.CharField()
    url = forms.URLField()
    comment = forms.CharField(widget=forms.Textarea)

This would specify a form with a comment that uses a larger Textarea widget, rather than the default TextInput widget.

Customizing widget instances

When Django renders a widget as HTML, it only renders the bare minimum HTML - Django doesn't add a class definition, or any other widget-specific attributes. This means that all 'TextInput' widgets will appear the same on your web page.

If you want to make one widget look different to another, you need to specify additional attributes for each widget. When you specify a widget, you can provide a list of attributes that will be added to the rendered HTML for the widget.

For example, take the following simple form:

class CommentForm(forms.Form):
    name = forms.CharField()
    url = forms.URLField()
    comment = forms.CharField()

This form will include three default TextInput widgets, with default rendering - no CSS class, no extra attributes. This means that the input boxes provided for each widget will be rendered exactly the same:

>>> f = CommentForm(auto_id=False)
>>> f.as_table()
<tr><th>Name:</th><td><input type="text" name="name" /></td></tr>
<tr><th>Url:</th><td><input type="text" name="url"/></td></tr>
<tr><th>Comment:</th><td><input type="text" name="comment" /></td></tr>

On a real web page, you probably don't want every widget to look the same. You might want a larger input element for the comment, and you might want the 'name' widget to have some special CSS class. To do this, you use the attrs argument when creating the widget:

Widget.attrs

For example:

class CommentForm(forms.Form):
    name = forms.CharField(
                widget=forms.TextInput(attrs={'class':'special'}))
    url = forms.URLField()
    comment = forms.CharField(
               widget=forms.TextInput(attrs={'size':'40'}))

Django will then include the extra attributes in the rendered output:

>>> f = CommentForm(auto_id=False)
>>> f.as_table()
<tr><th>Name:</th><td><input type="text" name="name" class="special"/></td></tr>
<tr><th>Url:</th><td><input type="text" name="url"/></td></tr>
<tr><th>Comment:</th><td><input type="text" name="comment" size="40"/></td></tr>