We love Django here at Isotoma, and we love using Django’s awesome form classes to generate self-generating, self-validating, [X]HTML forms.

However, in practically every new Django project I find myself doing the same thing over and over again (and I know others do too): breaking the display of a Django form instance up into individual fields, with appropriate mark-up wrappers.

Effectively I keep recreating the output of BaseForm.as_p/as_ul/as_table with template tags and mark-up.

For example, outputting a login form, rather than doing:

{{ form.as_p }}

We would do:

<p>
{% if form.username.errors %}
  {% for error in form.username.errors %}
    {{ error }}
  {% endfor %}
{% endif %}
{{ form.username.label }} {{ form.username }}
</p>
<p>
{% if form.password.errors %}
  {% for error in form.password.errors %}
    {{ error }}
  {% endfor %}
{% endif %}
{{ form.password.label }} {{ form.password }}
</p>

Why would you want to do this? There are several reasons, but generally it’s to apply custom mark-up to a particular element (notice I said mark-up, not styling, that can be done with the generated field IDs), as well as completely customising the output of the form (using <div>‘s instead etc.), and also because some designers tend to prefer this way of looking at a template.

“But”, you might say, “Django already creates all this for us with the handy as_p/as_ul/as_table methods, can you just take the ouput from that?”
Well, yes, in fact on a project a couple of weeks ago that’s exactly what I did, outputting as_p in a template, and then editing the source chucked out in a browser.
Which gave me the idea to create a simple little tool to do this for me, but with the Django template tags for dynamically outputting the field labels and fields themselves.

I created django-form-scaffold to do just this, and now I can do this from a Python shell:

>>> from dfs import scaffold
>>> from MyProject.MyApp.forms import MyForm
>>> form = MyForm()
>>> # We can pass either an instance of our form class
>>> # or the class itself, but better to pass an instance.
>>> print scaffold.as_p(form)

{% if form.email.errors %}{% for error in form.email.errors %}
{{ error }}{% endfor %}{% endif %}
<p>{{ form.email.label }} {{ form.email }}</p>
{% if form.password1.errors %}{% for error in form.password1.errors %}
{{ error }}{% endfor %}{% endif %}
<p&gtl{{ form.password1.label }} {{ form.password1 }}</p>
{% if form.password2.errors %}{% for error in form.password2.errors %}
{{ error }}{% endfor %}{% endif %}
<p>{{ form.password2.label }} {{ form.password2 }}</p>

Copy and paste this into a template, tweak, and Robert’s your mother’s brother.

As well as as_p(), the dfs.scaffold module also has the equivalent functions as_ul(), as_table, and an extra as_div() function.