Making a complex customized Django form template? Remember to include form.non_field_errors!

04Apr08

This drove me crazy for about 30 minutes.

If you’re making a heavily customized form template with Django, the newforms documentation suggests this format:

But, if you do any sort of non-field specific (form-level) validation, those validation messages won’t be returned to the user. So, instead of seeing a message like, “Both password fields must match,” the form just reloads without a explanation, confusing our poor end-users (and me for about 30 minutes)!

A quick #django IRC session later and I had the answer: form.non_field_errors

This did the trick for me:

I’m no professional developer, but a lack of Google search results for this matter inspired me to make a quick post and tag it well so future Django form template customizers don’t pull their hair out.

(Sorry to post the code as images, but [hosted] WordPress doesn’t escape HTML enclosed in code blocks! Ridiculous.)

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Filed under: internets, tech   |  13 Comments
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13 Responses to “Making a complex customized Django form template? Remember to include form.non_field_errors!”  

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  1. 1 Julius on April 15, 2008 said:

    I didn’t even know IRC was still around. Nice.

    Reply
  2. 2 narutoindisguise on May 27, 2008 said:

    Thats awesome, I never knew it before untill today. Great job. :)

    Reply
  3. 3 Tyler Bye on May 27, 2008 said:

    Bit by this just this morning. Appreciate the post. I’m using Form Wizard and a custom layout to accomplish some mid wizard ajax validation. This post hit the spot on the form validation errors I was hitting.

    Thanks!

    Reply
  4. 4 Aral Balkan on June 29, 2008 said:

    Thanks for posting this, it helped me out :)

    Reply
  5. 5 Guido García on August 31, 2008 said:

    Thank you for your post.
    Also documented here : http://code.djangoproject.com/browser/django/trunk/docs/ref/forms/validation.txt?rev=8511

    Regards.

    Reply
  6. 6 das on December 17, 2008 said:

    this helped alot thanks

    Reply
  7. 7 Dmitri on December 25, 2008 said:

    I am new to django .
    my form renders as html code

    Username:

    It does not display the actual text box .

    Please assist .

    Reply
  8. 8 lgespee on January 6, 2009 said:

    Thanks for the great tip. I couldn’t find this anywhere in Django’s documentation.

    There is however a strange thing going on, form.non_field_errors.as_ul does add the tags (I am using Django 1.0). I used a workaround by iterating manually through the non_field_errors.

    Reply
  9. 9 Adam on March 10, 2009 said:

    Thanks so much!
    I was halfway through making a custom form and view and all sorts of mess to try and get at the __all__ errors field that the template system won’t show but contained the all-important “invalid username/password” error. Luckily your post (and shortly, a git reset) saved the day!

    Reply
  10. 10 ted on May 12, 2009 said:

    THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.

    Reply
  11. 11 EconJohn on June 10, 2009 said:

    You are my hero!! Without this post I would have been banging my head against the wall all day!

    Reply
  12. 12 Paul Eastlund on July 25, 2009 said:

    Thanks! Just ran into the exact same issue — this was very helpful!

    Reply
  13. 13 Cyril Pauya on January 27, 2010 said:

    Thanks! This solved my problem.

    Reply

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