Django: Can class-based views accept two forms at a time?

Question

If I have two forms:

class ContactForm(forms.Form):
    name = forms.CharField()
    message = forms.CharField(widget=forms.Textarea)

class SocialForm(forms         


        

Answer 1

I have used a following generic view based on TemplateView:

def merge_dicts(x, y):
    """
    Given two dicts, merge them into a new dict as a shallow copy.
    """
    z = x.copy()
    z.update(y)
    return z


class MultipleFormView(TemplateView):
    """
    View mixin that handles multiple forms / formsets.
    After the successful data is inserted ``self.process_forms`` is called.
    """
    form_classes = {}

    def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
        context = super(MultipleFormView, self).get_context_data(**kwargs)
        forms_initialized = {name: form(prefix=name)
                             for name, form in self.form_classes.items()}

        return merge_dicts(context, forms_initialized)

    def post(self, request):
        forms_initialized = {
            name: form(prefix=name, data=request.POST)
            for name, form in self.form_classes.items()}

        valid = all([form_class.is_valid()
                     for form_class in forms_initialized.values()])
        if valid:
            return self.process_forms(forms_initialized)
        else:
            context = merge_dicts(self.get_context_data(), forms_initialized)
            return self.render_to_response(context)

    def process_forms(self, form_instances):
        raise NotImplemented

This has the advantage that it is reusable and all the validation is done on the forms themselves.

It is then used as follows:

class AddSource(MultipleFormView):
    """
    Custom view for processing source form and seed formset
    """
    template_name = 'add_source.html'
    form_classes = {
        'source_form': forms.SourceForm,
        'seed_formset': forms.SeedFormset,
    }

    def process_forms(self, form_instances):
        pass # saving forms etc