Django with super and Init

March 10, 2022

I dont understand this code. I’m watching couple of tutorial for python/django tutorial.
Hope you guys can enlighten me.

class ProfileForm(ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = Profile
        fields = ['name', 'email', 'username',
                  'location', 'bio', 'short_intro', 'profile_image',
                  'social_github', 'social_linkedin', 'social_twitter',
                  'social_youtube', 'social_website']

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(ProfileForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)

        for name, field in self.fields.items():
            field.widget.attrs.update({'class': 'input'})

what does this code do?

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(ProfileForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)

        for name, field in self.fields.items():
            field.widget.attrs.update({'class': 'input'})

Thanks

>Solution :

You are just adding the class "input" to all fields in your form:

<input type="text" class="input" .... ....>

In the latest Django versions you don’t need to specify the class in super, you can do this:

super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)

You can use def init, for example, to change the default attributes of your fields:

def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
    super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
    for field in self.fields: 
        self.fields[field].widget.attrs['class'] = 'input' #same as your code
    self.fields['email'].widget.attrs['required'] = True #required argument to the email field

You can learn more about def "init" here: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/custom-model-fields/