django: form.fields not iterating through instance fields

Question

I am trying to iterate through form.fields in a template and for:

{% for field in form.fields %}
   {{ field }}, 
{% endfor %}

I am getting

Answer 1

The field you get are of django.forms.Field instances. To get the html view from it, you can use the widget function. {{ field.widget }}

Answer 2

You want to iterate over "form," not "form.fields". The latter returns Field instances, the former returns BoundField instances (even in the case of an unbound form), which render their widget HTML.

form.visible_fields and form.hidden_fields are utility methods to only get the visible/hidden fields of the form, but they also return BoundField instances. They are not in any way parallel to form.fields (I agree that this isn't the clearest possible API).

Answer 3

Iterating "form" instead over "form.fields" solved the problem. Not sure why as the documentation also provides examples such as:

{% for field in form.visible_fields %}
...

which also results in empty sets. Has to do with the fact that my form is not bound? not sure...