Using Django Forms to display and edit?

Question

I'm wrestling with how to best create HTML pages in Django that can either be used for displaying or editing data. That is, I'd like the field's values to appear as text in display mode, but in their widgets when in edit/add mode. It appears that Django wasn't designed to do this: the fields always appear in their widgets (eg, text input, text area, etc).

Is there a common technique for handling this, short of using forms for one, and not the other?

I was thinking of a custom templatetag filter that could be used for every form field, like:

{{ form.field_name|render_field:mode }}

where render_field would either return the field's HTML widget, or just the value as text, based on the mode.

Have I missed something, or is this a viable solution?

Answer 1

Answering my own question, apparently. I ended up with a three-part solution:

1. attach the model to the form, so I'll have the default display widgets for each field
2. write the form using a template tag, passing it the form.field, user, and action
3. write a render template tag to handle #2

Step one:

form.model = Model(...)

Step two:

 {{form.field1.label}}
 {% render form.field1 user action %}


 {{form.field2.label}}
 {% render form.field2 user action %}

Step three:

Something like:

def render(formfield, user, action, default_text="Private"):
    if not user.is_authenticated():
        action = "view"
    if action == "view":
        if user.is_authenticated():
            fieldname = formfield.name 
            retval = str(getattr(formfield.form.model, fieldname))
        else:
            retval = default_text
    else:
        retval = formfield.as_widget()
    return retval