How do I display the value of a Django form field in a template?

Question

I have a form with an email property.

When using {{ form.email }} in case of some validation error, Django still renders the previous value in the input tag's value attribute:

<input type="text" id="id_email" maxlength="75" class="required"
       value="[email protected]" name="email">

I want to render the input tag myself (to add some JavaScript code and an error class in case of an error). For example this is my template instead of {{ form.email }}:

<input type="text" autocomplete="on" id="id_email" name="email"
       class="email {% if form.email.errors %} error {% endif %}">

However, this does not display the erroneous value ([email protected] in this example) to the user.

How do I get the field's value in the template?

Answer 1

This was a feature request that got fixed in Django 1.3.

Here's the bug: https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/10427

Basically, if you're running something after 1.3, in Django templates you can do:

{{ form.field.value|default_if_none:"" }}

Or in Jinja2:

{{ form.field.value()|default("") }}

Note that field.value() is a method, but in Django templates ()'s are omitted, while in Jinja2 method calls are explicit.

If you want to know what version of Django you're running, it will tell you when you do the runserver command.

If you are on something prior to 1.3, you can probably use the fix posted in the above bug: https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/10427#comment:24