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

Posted on April 4, 2008 by kfarr

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.)

This entry was posted in internets, tech and tagged 0.96, attribute, dev, django, error, field, field specific, form, form wide, form-level, form.as_ul, form.errors, form.errors.all, form.field_errors, forms, forms.ValidationError, level, message, new forms, newforms, non, non-field, non-field-specific, non-specific, non_field_errors, python, release, specific, svn, validation, validationerror, validator. Bookmark the permalink.

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

Julius says:

April 15, 2008 at 8:46 am

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

Reply
narutoindisguise says:

May 27, 2008 at 5:23 am

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

Reply
Tyler Bye says:

May 27, 2008 at 5:52 am

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
Aral Balkan says:

June 29, 2008 at 6:20 am

Thanks for posting this, it helped me out 🙂

Reply
Guido García says:

August 31, 2008 at 12:28 pm

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

Regards.

Reply
das says:

December 17, 2008 at 10:42 am

this helped alot thanks

Reply
Dmitri says:

December 25, 2008 at 7:24 am

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

Username:

It does not display the actual text box .

Please assist .

Reply
lgespee says:

January 6, 2009 at 1:38 pm

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.

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Adam says:

March 10, 2009 at 4:29 pm

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!

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ted says:

May 12, 2009 at 8:16 am

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.

Reply
EconJohn says:

June 10, 2009 at 12:35 pm

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

Reply
Paul Eastlund says:

July 25, 2009 at 5:08 pm

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

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Cyril Pauya says:

January 27, 2010 at 7:26 pm

Thanks! This solved my problem.

Reply