Change a Django form field to a hidden field

Question

I have a Django form with a RegexField, which is very similar to a normal text input field.

In my view, under certain conditions I want to hide it from

Answer 1

Firstly, if you don't want the user to modify the data, then it seems cleaner to simply exclude the field. Including it as a hidden field just adds more data to send over the wire and invites a malicious user to modify it when you don't want them to. If you do have a good reason to include the field but hide it, you can pass a keyword arg to the modelform's constructor. Something like this perhaps:

class MyModelForm(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = MyModel
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        from django.forms.widgets import HiddenInput
        hide_condition = kwargs.pop('hide_condition',None)
        super(MyModelForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        if hide_condition:
            self.fields['fieldname'].widget = HiddenInput()
            # or alternately:  del self.fields['fieldname']  to remove it from the form altogether.

Then in your view:

form = MyModelForm(hide_condition=True)

I prefer this approach to modifying the modelform's internals in the view, but it's a matter of taste.