django crispy-forms & floppyforms w/ bootstrap: how to get help_text into a ModelForm?

Question

I'm having a small (but annoying) problem with django forms right now.

I'm using:

• twitter bootstrap
• django floppyforms (just for the html5 widgets)
• django crispy-forms (for the template tags & rendering)
• my forms are all ModelForms and that shouldn't change if possible

I've searched the whole web and tried a lot of stuff, but I can't figure out the place where I can inject help_text="Some random help text" into the code. So here's my code(abbreviated for sanity reasons):

#forms.py:

import floppyforms as forms
from crispy_forms.helper import FormHelper
from crispy_forms.layout import *
from crispy_forms.bootstrap import *
from courses.models import *

class CourseForm(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
    model = Course
    widgets = {
        'title': forms.TextInput,  # This is a floppyforms widget
        ...
    }

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.helper = FormHelper()
        self.helper.form_method = 'POST'
        self.helper.form_id = ''
        self.helper.form_class = 'form-horizontal'
        self.helper.form_action = ''  # redirect in the view
        self.helper.form_tag = True
        self.helper.help_text_inline = True  # means that I want <span> elements 
        self.helper.layout = Layout(
            Fieldset('Create a new course',  # fieldset label
                Field('title', placeholder="Something...", css_class="span4"),
                ...
            ),
            FormActions(
                Submit(
                    'submit',
                    'Submit',
                    css_class="btn-primary"
                )
            ),
        )
        super(CourseForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)

I tried to inject it as an 'attrs' dict into the widget and as an attr into the Field.

forms.TextInput(attrs={'help_text': 'Some help text'})
Field('title', help_text="Some help text", css_class="span4")

Needless to say that it didn't work. I need a hook to put the help text into a 'span' or 'p' inside my controls-div, not into the input widget.

My template is very minimal and it should stay that way if possible. I don't want to iterate over the form fields:

#create_course.html

{% extends 'base.html'%}
{% load crispy_forms_tags %}

{% block content%}
{% crispy form %}
{% endblock content%} 

That renders as the following html:

<div id="div_id_title" class="clearfix control-group">
  <label class="control-label requiredField" for="id_title">
    Title
    <span class="asteriskField">*</span>
  </label>
  <div class="controls">
    <input id="id_title" class="span4 textinput textInput" type="text" placeholder="Something..." maxlength="60" required="" name="title">
  </div>
</div>

With the help text it should look like this:

<div id="div_id_title" class="clearfix control-group">
  <label class="control-label requiredField" for="id_title">
    Title
    <span class="asteriskField">*</span>
  </label>
  <div class="controls">
    <input id="id_title" class="span4 textinput textInput" type="text" placeholder="Something..." maxlength="60" required="" name="title">
    **<span class="help-inline">Supporting help text</span>**
  </div>
</div>

Any help is appreciated! I haven't tried to inject the code through views.py into the form, but I see no point in doing that. It should be possible to do that in forms.py with the right hook and syntax.

Sorry for the long text for such a simple problem ;)

Answer 1

I found out what the problem was. Since I didn't really define the Fields anywhere (I only defined the field widgets), I couldn't access the help_text. You can either define the Fields in forms.py (which is unnecessary and bad practice, they're ModelFields after all) or set the help_text for the model in models.py.

Hope that helps others who have a similar problem.