Django: how to cleanup form fields and avoid code duplication
- by Alexander Konstantinov
Quite often I need to filter some form data before using it (saving to database etc.) Let's say I want to strip whitespaces and replace repeating whitespaces with a single one in most of the text fields, in many forms. It's not difficult to do this using clean_<fieldname> methods:
# Simplified model with two text fields
class MyModel(models.Model):
title = models.CharField()
description = models.CharField()
# Model-based form
class MyForm(forms.ModelForm):
class Meta:
model = MyModel
def clean_title(self):
title = self.cleaned_data['title']
return re.sub(r'\s{2,}', ' ', title.strip())
def clean_description(self):
description = self.cleaned_data['description']
return re.sub(r'\s{2,}', ' ', description.strip())
It does exactly what I need, and has a nice side effect which I like: if user enters only whitespaces, the field will be considered empty and therefore invalid (if it is required) and I don't even have to throw a ValidationError.
The obvious problem here is code duplication. Even if I'll create some function for that, say my_text_filter, I'll have to call it for every text field in all my forms:
from myproject.filters import my_text_filter
class MyForm(forms.ModelForm):
class Meta:
model = MyModel
def clean_title(self):
return my_text_filter(self.cleaned_data['title'])
def clean_description(self):
return my_text_filter(self.cleaned_data['description'])
The question: is there any standard and simple way in Django (I use version 1.2 if that matters) to do this (like, for example, by adding property validators = {'title': my_text_filter, 'description': my_text_filter} to MyModel), or at least some more or less standard workaround? I've read about form validation and validators in the documentation, but couldn't find what I need there.
