get request data in Django form

Question

Is it possible to get request.user data in a form class? I want to clean an email address to make sure that it's unique, but if it's the current users email address then it should pass.

This is what I currently have which works great for creating new users, but if I want to edit a user I run into the problem of their email not validating, because it comes up as being taken already. If I could check that it's their email using request.user.email then I would be able to solve my problem, but I'm not sure how to do that.

class editUserForm(forms.Form):     email_address = forms.EmailField(widget=forms.TextInput(attrs={'class':'required'}))      def clean_email_address(self):         this_email = self.cleaned_data['email_address']         test = UserProfiles.objects.filter(email = this_email)         if len(test)>0:             raise ValidationError("A user with that email already exists.")         else:             return this_email 

Answer 1

As ars and Diarmuid have pointed out, you can pass request.user into your form, and use it in validating the email. Diarmuid's code, however, is wrong. The code should actually read:

from django import forms  class UserForm(forms.Form):     email_address = forms.EmailField(         widget=forms.TextInput(             attrs={                 'class': 'required'             }         )     )      def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):         self.user = kwargs.pop('user', None)         super(UserForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)      def clean_email_address(self):         email = self.cleaned_data.get('email_address')          if self.user and self.user.email == email:             return email          if UserProfile.objects.filter(email=email).count():             raise forms.ValidationError(                 u'That email address already exists.'             )          return email 

Then, in your view, you can use it like so:

def someview(request):     if request.method == 'POST':         form = UserForm(request.POST, user=request.user)         if form.is_valid():             # Do something with the data             pass     else:         form = UserForm(user=request.user)     # Rest of your view follows 

Note that you should pass request.POST as a keyword argument, since your constructor expects 'user' as the first positional argument.

Doing it this way, you need to pass user as a keyword argument. You can either pass request.POST as a positional argument, or a keyword argument (via data=request.POST).