What is the difference between using Django form and manually setting date fields? - django

Question

I am getting date/time info from ajax to Django. I am using 2 different views. event_edit is working fine, but event_edit_new does not work. It return an error Enter a valid date/time.
My question is what is making difference. They are getting exactly same information but one is ok while other one is not.
Javascript code making ajax request:
var ajax_test = function(event){
$.ajax({
url: '/scheduler/event/' + event.eventId + '/edit2/',
method: 'POST', // 'POST' or 'PUT'
data: {
'Note': event.title,
'OpNum': event.resourceId,
'StartTime' : event.start.format(),
'StopTime' : event.end.format(),
'ScheduleNum': event.eventId,
}
}).done(function(res) {
console.log("done", res)
}).fail(function(error) {
console.error("error", error)
console.log(event.start.format());
});
}
2 views
def event_edit(request, pk):
schedule = get_object_or_404(Schedule, pk=pk)
schedule.OpNum = request.POST.get('OpNum')
schedule.Note = request.POST.get('Note')
schedule.StartTime = request.POST.get('StartTime')
schedule.StopTime = request.POST.get('StopTime')
schedule.ScheduleNum =request.POST.get('ScheduleNum')
schedule.save()
return HttpResponse('ok')
def event_edit_new(request, pk):
schedule = get_object_or_404(Schedule, pk=pk)
if request.method =='POST':
form = ScheduleForm(request.POST, request.FILES, instance = schedule)
if form.is_valid():
form.save()
return HttpResponse('ok')
else:
return HttpResponse('error')
else:
return HttpResponse('done')

Answer 1

In your first view, there is no validation applied to user data input:
schedule.StartTime = request.POST.get('StartTime')
schedule.StopTime = request.POST.get('StopTime')
request.POST does not validate any data so that will grab user data exactly as submitted and set it on a model. Note that it might work but it is not guaranteed to work if user will ever send datetime format the application does not understand. For example try submitting something like "invalid date" and you should get 500 error.
Your second view on the other hand uses a Django Form to validate user input. By using a form you are validating user input before processing it in any way. You did not paste how your form is structured however if you are getting Enter a valid date/time. this means Django form did not validate one of the datetime fields. There are couple of reasons why that might be:
submitted datetime does is not one of input_formats for a DateTimeField. You can customize the formats with:
class MyForm(forms.Form):
datetime_field = forms.DateTimeField(input_formats=['%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ', ...])
submitted datetime is not one of Django's default supported datetime formats.
You can customize them with DATETIME_INPUT_FORMATS setting.