Override a Django generic class-based view widget - django

Question

Say I have a basic CreateView form, like this, to allow new users to register on a site:
from django.contrib.auth import get_user_model
from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.views.generic import CreateView
User = get_user_model()
class Signup(CreateView):
model = User
fields = ['first_name', 'last_name', 'email', 'password']
I just tried this, and found that the password field is rendered in plain text; how would I go about overriding the view so that it uses forms.PasswordInput() instead? (I realise it's probably easiest to just define the form by hand, but I'm just curious about how you'd do that.)

Answer 1

You could override get_form(), and modify the form to change the widget on the password field:
from django import forms
class Signup(CreateView):
model = User
fields = ['first_name', 'last_name', 'email', 'password']
def get_form(self, form_class):
form = super(Signup, self).get_form(form_class)
form.fields['password'].widget = forms.PasswordInput()
return form
But an even better way would be to just create a custom form class. In the custom class just set widgets on the Meta class. Like this:
from django import forms
class SignupForm(forms.ModelForm):
class Meta:
model = User
fields = ['first_name', 'last_name', 'email', 'password']
widgets = {
'password': forms.PasswordInput()
}
class Signup(CreateView):
form_class = SignupForm
model = User
Usually you would put the custom form class in a forms.py file as well.

Answer 2

Not sure if this affected earlier versions of Django, but in more recent versions the get_form() should have a default form_class=None when overriding that method.
The updated (Python 3, Django 2.2) example would be:
from django import forms
class Signup(CreateView):
model = User
fields = ['first_name', 'last_name', 'email', 'password']
def get_form(self, form_class=None):
form = super().get_form(form_class)
form.fields['password'].widget = forms.PasswordInput()
return form
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.2/ref/class-based-views/mixins-editing/#django.views.generic.edit.FormMixin