Create Custom Error Messages with Model Forms

Question

New in Django 1.6:

ModelForm accepts several new Meta options.

• Fields included in the localized_fields list will be localized (by setting localize on the form field).
• The labels, help_texts and error_messages options may be used to customize the default fields, see Overriding the default fields for details.

From that:

class AuthorForm(ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = Author
        fields = ('name', 'title', 'birth_date')
        labels = {
            'name': _('Writer'),
        }
        help_texts = {
            'name': _('Some useful help text.'),
        }
        error_messages = {
            'name': {
                'max_length': _("This writer's name is too long."),
            },
        }

Related: Django's ModelForm - where is the list of Meta options?

For simple cases, you can specify custom error messages

class AuthorForm(forms.ModelForm):
    first_name = forms.CharField(error_messages={'required': 'Please let us know what to call you!'})
    class Meta:
        model = Author

Another easy way of doing this is just override it in init.

class AuthorForm(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = Author

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

        # add custom error messages
        self.fields['name'].error_messages.update({
            'required': 'Please let us know what to call you!',
        })

I have wondered about this many times as well. That's why I finally wrote a small extension to the ModelForm class, which allows me to set arbitrary field attributes - including the error messages - via the Meta class. The code and explanation can be found here: http://blog.brendel.com/2012/01/django-modelforms-setting-any-field.html

You will be able to do things like this:

class AuthorForm(ExtendedMetaModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = Author
        field_args = {
            "first_name" : {
                "error_messages" : {
                    "required" : "Please let us know what to call you!"
                }
            }
        }

I think that's what you are looking for, right?

the easyest way is to override the clean method:

class AuthorForm(forms.ModelForm):
   class Meta:
      model = Author
   def clean(self):
      if self.cleaned_data.get('name')=="":
         raise forms.ValidationError('No name!')
      return self.cleaned_data