I have a form, that calls itself and displays a result at the bottom. I want the form to be filled with the data from the previous POST request from the same form, so that I do not have to type in the same data again, after submitting it.
This took me some time to figure out, so I'll self answer this yet again.
It is actually quite simple. The trick is to know which method to put it in. First I tried it in the __init__() method and the post() method, without any luck.
The get_intitial() method does the trick as its name suggests.
There is a dictionary called POST in the self.request object of the view. You can just get the data from there and put it into the self.initial dictionary, and that's it. In the example I use three fields: text, name and publication.
class MyFormView(FormView):
template_name = 'form_template.jinja2'
form_class = MyForm
def get_initial(self):
super().get_initial()
if self.request.POST:
self.initial["text"] = self.request.POST.get("text")
self.initial["name"] = self.request.POST.get("name")
self.initial["publication"] = self.request.POST.get("publication")
return self.initial.copy()
if self.request.POST with if self.request.method == "POST" - not that it would change much in this case, but that's the proper way to check the request method (you could have a POST request with no data submitted, in which case request.POST would be empty, hence considered as false in a boolean context).request.POST should NOT be populated if the method wasn't "POST", testing on the request method instead of the non-emptiness of request.POST _is "relying on a side effect condition" (request.POST being - possibly - populated being a side effect of having a POST request).