django forms dateField fails validation

Question

I am trying to validate a User Profiling form in django and I can't. It seems that there is something wrong with forms.dateField(). It does not validate (ie. is_valid() return false)

this is my forms dateField entry: date_of_birth = forms.DateField(label=u'date of birth', input_formats='%d/%m/%Y', required=False, widget=forms.DateInput(format = '%d/%m/%Y'))

I noticed that request.POST.get('date_of_birth', '') returns the correct date (ie. the date I have typed in the html form field).

I also noticed that in this function:

def clean_date_of_birth(self):
    date = self.cleaned_data['date_of_birth']

date object is always None.

What am I doing wrong?

EDIT:

This is what I am trying to enter: 29/07/1974 (July 29th, 1974)

This is the output of 'submit' (various requests)

29/07/1974
profile form is *NOT* valid
[23/Feb/2012 12:16:27] "POST /profile/chris/ HTTP/1.1" 200 16289

29/7/1974
profile form is *NOT* valid
[23/Feb/2012 12:16:33] "POST /profile/chris/ HTTP/1.1" 200 16289

1974-07-29
profile form is *NOT* valid
[23/Feb/2012 12:18:15] "POST /profile/chris/ HTTP/1.1" 200 16289

This is my template

    <div class="input_area">
        <form id="profile_form" method="post" action="/profile/{{ user.username }}/">{% csrf_token %}
            {{ form.as_p }}
            <input type="submit" id="submit" value="save" class="submitButton idle" style="width:70px" />
        </form>
    </div>

this is my views.py

def profile(request, username):
    form = ProfileForm(request.POST)
    print request.POST.get('date_of_birth', 'None')
    try:
        user = User.objects.get(username=username)
    except User.DoesNotExist:
        raise Http404(u'User not Found')
    if form.is_valid():
        print 'profile form is valid'
    else:
        print 'profile form is *NOT* valid'

and finally this is my forms.py (do not use clean_data functions at the moment)

class ProfileForm(forms.Form):

    tz = []
    timezones = Timezone.objects.all()
    for timezone in timezones:
        val = str(timezone.hour)
        v = val.split(':')
        tuple = (timezone.id, '('+timezone.sign+''+v[0]+':'+v[1]+') '+timezone.name)
        tz.append(tuple)

    sex = [('male','male'),('female', 'female'),('unknown', 'prefer not to say')]
    real_name = forms.CharField(label=u'real name', widget=forms.TextInput, required=False)
    date_of_birth = forms.DateField(label=u'date of birth', input_formats='%d/%m/%Y', required=False, widget=forms.DateInput(format = '%d/%m/%Y'))
    pp_email = forms.EmailField(label=u'Paypal Email', widget=forms.TextInput, required=False)
    gender = forms.ChoiceField(label=u'sex', choices=sex, widget=forms.Select(), required=False)
    timezone = forms.ChoiceField(label=u'time zone', choices=tz, widget=forms.Select())
    address = forms.CharField(label=u'street address', widget=forms.Textarea, required=False)
    postal  = forms.CharField(label=u'postal code', widget=forms.TextInput, required=False)

Answer 1

input formats in DateField must be list or tuple https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/forms/fields/#django.forms.DateField.input_formats

Answer 2

With Django 1.6 and up you can use the localized_fields in your form's Meta or localize=True in your form. See https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/topics/i18n/formatting/#format-localization.

When using USE_L10N = True, Django will use the formats.py file for your locale (part of LANGUAGE_CODE).

You can end up with something DRY like this (as the fields specified in models.py do not need to be repeated in forms.py):

class SomeForm(forms.Form):

    class Meta:
        model = SomeModel
        fields = ('first_name', 'dob',)
        localized_fields = ('dob',)