django-floppyforms¶
django-floppyforms is an application that gives you full control of the output of forms rendering. The forms API and features are exactly the same as Django’s, the key difference is that fields and widgets are rendered in templates instead of using string interpolation, giving you full control of the output using Django templates.
The widgets API allows you to customize and extend the widgets behaviour,
making it very easy to define custom widgets. The default widgets are very
similar to the default Django widgets, except that they implement some nice
features of HTML5 forms, such as the placeholder
and required
attribute, as well as the new <input>
types. For more information, read
this if you haven’t yet.
The form rendering API is a set of template tags that lets you render forms
using custom layouts. This is very similar to Django’s as_p
, as_ul
or
as_table
, except that you can customize and add layouts to your
convenience.
The source code is hosted on github.
Installation¶
As a requirement of django-floppyforms, you will need to have Django in version 1.4 or higher installed and use Python 2.7 or newer. Python >=3.3 and PyPy are supported!
Two-step process to install django-floppyforms:
pip install django-floppyforms
- Add
'floppyforms'
to yourINSTALLED_APPS
When you’re done you can jump to the usage section. For the impatient reader, there’s also an examples section.
Using django-floppyforms
¶
Getting help¶
Feel free to join the #django-floppyforms
IRC channel on freenode.
Why the name?¶
- There aren’t enough packages with silly names in the Django community. So, here’s one more.
- The name reflects the idea that a widget can take any kind of shape, if that makes any sense.
Performance¶
Each time a widget is rendered, there is a template inclusion. To what extent does it affect performance? You can try with this little script:
import timeit
django = """from django import forms
class DjangoForm(forms.Form):
text = forms.CharField()
slug = forms.SlugField()
some_bool = forms.BooleanField()
email = forms.EmailField()
date = forms.DateTimeField()
file_ = forms.FileField()
rendered = DjangoForm().as_p()"""
flop = """import floppyforms as forms
class FloppyForm(forms.Form):
text = forms.CharField()
slug = forms.SlugField()
some_bool = forms.BooleanField()
email = forms.EmailField()
date = forms.DateTimeField()
file_ = forms.FileField()
rendered = FloppyForm().as_p()"""
def time(stmt):
t = timeit.Timer(stmt=stmt)
return t.timeit(number=1000)
print "Plain django:", time(django)
print "django-floppyforms:", time(flop)
The result varies if you’re doing template caching or not. To put it simply, here is the average time for a single iteration on a MacBookPro @ 2.53GHz.
Method | Time without template caching | Time with template caching |
---|---|---|
Plain Django | 1.63973999023 msec | 1.6320669651 msec |
django-floppyforms | 9.05481505394 msec | 3.0161819458 msec |
Even with template caching, the rendering time is doubled. However the impact is probably not noticeable since rendering the form above takes 3 milliseconds instead of 1.6: it still takes no time :). The use of template caching in production is, of course, encouraged.