how to show a django ModelForm field as uneditable

Question

taking my initial lessons with django ModelForm ,I wanted to give the user ,ability to edit an entry in a blog.The BlogEntry has a date,postedTime, title and content.I want to show the user an editform which shows all these fields,but with only title and content as editable. The date and postedTime should be shown as uneditable.

class BlogEntry(models.Model):
   title = models.CharField(unique=True,max_length=50)
   description = models.TextField(blank=True)
   date = models.DateField(default=datetime.date.today)
   postedTime = models.TimeField(null=True)

...

For adding an entry ,I use a ModelForm in the normal way..

class BlogEntryAddForm(ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = BlogEntry
...

But how do I create the edit form?I want it to show the date,postedTime as uneditable (but still show them on the form) and let the user edit the title and description.

if I use,exclude in class Meta for date and postedTime,that will cause them not to appear on the form.So,how can I show them as uneditable?

class BlogEntryEditForm(ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = BlogEntry
        ...?...

Answer 1

In the form object, declare the attribute of the field as readonly:

form.fields['field'].widget.attrs['readonly'] = True

Answer 2

Is date field represent a date when the entry first created or when it was modified last time? If first then use auto_now_add option else use auto_now. That is:

date = models.DateField(auto_now_add=True)

will set date to now when entry will be created.

auto_now_add makes field uneditable. For other cases use editable option to make any field uneditable. For example

postedDate = models.TimeField(null=True, editable=False)

Also, likely you will add posted boolean field to Entry model, so it is convinient to set auto_now on postedDate. It will set postedDate to now every time you modify a Entry including one when you set posted to True.