Input from template to a view in Django - django

Question

As you can tell, i'm new to Django, but already love it. I have a functional scraping server that scrapes 7 selects from a diagnostics page on one server. All environments I want to use this will have many of these servers with the same data to monitor performance. I would like to use this function to scrape this data from all entered target servers by input from the html template. Adding each server to monitor that will show up below the input text field from the main html page. I have completed this with a static url, but have been unsuccessful passing the different urls to scrape from the html template to the views url variable I have for the static address.
I've attempted to create forms and pass that to the html template without success, including editing the views file. Reverted the code back to the original working code to not cause more confusion.
html template:
<form method="POST">
{% csrf_token %}
<div class="field has-addons">
<div class="control is-expanded">
<input type="text" class="input"
placeholder="Relay Name">
</div>
<div class="control">
<button type="submit" class="button is-info">
Add Relay
</button>
</div>
</div>
</form>
Views.py:
import requests, bs4
from django.shortcuts import render
from django.http import HttpResponse
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from urllib.request import urlopen
from .models import Relay
def index(request):
url = 'hardcoded server url'
page = urlopen(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(page, 'html.parser')
relay = 'Relay'
dic = requests.get(url.format(relay))
elema = soup.select('body > div:nth-child(13) > div.forminput')
elem1 = elema[0].text.strip()
elemb = soup.select('body > div:nth-child(14) > div.forminput')
elem2 = elemb[0].text.strip()
elemc = soup.select('body > div:nth-child(15) > div.forminput')
elem3 = elemc[0].text.strip()
elemd = soup.select('body > div:nth-child(16) > div.forminput')
elem4 = elemd[0].text.strip()
eleme = soup.select('body > div:nth-child(17) > div.forminput')
elem5 = eleme[0].text.strip()
elemf = soup.select('body > div:nth-child(18) > div.forminput')
elem6 = elemf[0].text.strip()
elemg = soup.select('body > div.versioninfo')
elem7 = elemg[0].text.strip()
#creating dictionary object
dic = {}
dic['relay'] = relay
dic['FFSL'] = elem1
dic['FFCL'] = elem2
dic['FBFQFSL'] = elem3
dic['FBQFCL'] = elem4
dic['TQQ'] = elem5
dic['SQQ'] = elem6
dic['RV'] = elem7
print(dic)
context = {'dic' : dic}
return render(request, 'relchchk/relchck.html', context)
forms.py:
from django import forms
from django.forms import ModelForm, TextInput
from .models import Relay
class RelayForm(ModelForm):
class Meta:
model = Relay
fields = ['Name', 'Relay Version', ]
widgets = {'name' : TextInput(attrs={'class' : 'input',
'placeholder' : 'url'})}
models.py:
from django.db import models
class Relay(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=45)
def __str__(self):
return self.name
class Meta:
verbose_name_plural = 'Relays'
urls.py
from django.urls import path
from . import views
urlpatterns = [
path('', views.index),
]
The desired result would be to manually enter any of the target servers that could accumulate to all and save in database that exists (but not important now) and have the main page show all selected. I was moving along pretty well and thought this should be simple step and probably is, but I must be missing something. Any guidance would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

You haven't created an instance of your form. In your views.py file, it should look something like this.
if request.method="POST":
#code to handle the form
else:
form = RelayForm()
context = {
"form": form
}
You render the form like this:
<form method="POST">
{% csrf_token %}
{{ form.as_p }}
</form>
Read the docs to learn more about form handling and rendering.