Handling a Form in a View

In our last video, we handled showing a form, when someone requested a view. 0:00 This is known in HTTP parlance as a get request. 0:04 When we submit our form, though, 0:08 we don't want to put information into the URL, which a get request would do. 0:10 We want the data to be safely transmitted behind the scenes, in our HTTP headers, so 0:14 we'll use a post request. 0:19 That means though that we have to do a bit of extra work in our review 0:21 to process the form. 0:24 But hey, I know that we can do it. 0:26 Okay, so we should be all done with creating our form, 0:28 our URL, and our HTML template. 0:33 All the work we have to do now should be just inside of our views. 0:35 If we come here and we let me refresh this just make sure its good and 0:40 we put in a name and an email address and a suggestion like cover pyramid and 0:46 we hit submit like nothing happens right? 0:53 We can come back over here and we see that we just got a post, and 0:57 I gave it 200, because our view doesn't care. 1:02 Anytime a request comes in, get, 1:06 post, put, delete, patch, whatever, our view doesn't care. 1:10 Our view just goes to the exact same work every single time, no matter what. 1:14 So we need to make it were our view pays attention to the kind of 1:19 request that comes in. 1:24 So, let's go here and let's add, let's just leave our form like that for now. 1:26 And then we'll do an if. 1:34 And we'll say request.method is equal to POST. 1:37 And it'll always be all caps like that. 1:41 So if a POST request comes in, then we want to do something different. 1:43 What we want to do here is, we want to do form equals forms.SuggestionForm and 1:48 we want to give it the data from request.post. 1:55 So what this does is it takes all of the form data that comes in and 1:59 puts it into the form, and where the keys line up. 2:03 So request.post is kind of like a dictionary. 2:06 It has keys, and the keys have values. 2:10 So where the key, Name is, 2:13 or where the key Email is, it'll put that into the form. 2:17 So it just fills in the data from the request. 2:21 So that's cool, that's handy. 2:24 Now we need to make sure the form is valid, that they gave us good data. 2:26 So if form.is_valid, then we need to do something. 2:30 Let's just print right now, we'll just say good form and 2:37 then we won't run anything else. 2:41 We'll just leave that alone and 2:43 so then, that should be it for right now. 2:47 Okay, let's just stop right there for right now. 2:51 So if it's a post then it's gonna check to make sure it's valid. 2:53 And if it's valid, then it's gonna tell us good form. 2:56 So let's try this again. 2:59 And we'll say Kenneth and kenneth@example.com. 3:00 And we'll say Pygame! 3:04 Cuz a lot of people want Pygame. 3:07 So submit nothing's going to change on the site except for 3:09 you see our data is still in there. 3:14 And if we look here it printed out good form, so awesome, we know that it worked. 3:16 So what I want to do, is I want, when somebody creates a suggestion, 3:21 I want it to send me an email. 3:25 And so to do that there's a couple of pretty easy things that we can do. 3:27 So first of all we need to send an email. 3:32 So we need to go to settings.py and 3:35 it's way too much to ask that you all, and even myself, actually send emails. 3:39 So Django has some handy built-in email backends that we could 3:45 use and we can send emails just into this little console here or 3:50 we can do what I'm gonna do in this one, we can send emails into a file. 3:55 So we're gonna make a new setting here, EMAIL_BACKEND and it's going to be 3:59 django.core.mail.backends.filebased.Email- Backend. 4:04 That is a lot of words. 4:08 And then we have to give it a file path for 4:14 where to put the files that it creates for each email. 4:17 So we'll say EMAIL_FILE_PATH. 4:20 And that's gonna be os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 4:23 which is a variable we set up at the top of this file and suggestions. 4:27 And Django will create this folder for us, 4:35 we don't have to create this folder ourselves. 4:37 So that's all we have to do here, so that just puts 4:38 the emails into a really handy, really nice file format, okay? 4:44 So now, let's come back over here to our views and 4:51 up here in our imports we need to do a couple more imports. 4:55 So I'm gonna get a couple things ready. 4:59 Let's do from django.contrib import messages 5:03 from django.core.mail import send mail, 5:07 which is a really handy little function for sending mail. 5:12 From django.core.urlresolvers import reverse. 5:15 And from django.http import 5:23 HttpResponseRedirect. 5:28 All right, so these are things we're gonna need in just a little bit. 5:32 Let's minimize this down again. 5:36 All right so, now, right in here, where we've been doing this form, is valid. 5:38 Let's see about sending our e-mail. 5:43 So, the first thing we do is we call, send_mail, and 5:46 send mail requires a lot of argument, so I'm gonna do multiple lines here. 5:50 So the first argument that goes into send_mail is the subject. 5:54 So we're gonna say, Suggestion from and a placeholder. 5:58 And we're gonna fill this in with form.cleaned_data. 6:04 This is the good data that comes out after the form is validated. 6:07 And we're gonna put in name. 6:10 All right? 6:14 And then we put in the body of the email, so 6:14 this will be form.cleaned_data['suggestion']. 6:17 And then we put in the email address that it's from. 6:25 So we're gonna put in the name and the email. 6:30 This might be a slightly different way of using format that you haven't seen before 6:35 but you can feed it a dictionary and 6:38 it'll use the dictionary keys to fill in these names here. 6:41 And form.cleaned_data has a field called name and a field called email. 6:45 And then finally, we put in who it gets sent to. 6:50 So I'm gonna send it to myself. 6:53 But since this isn't actually going to go anywhere, it won't matter. 6:56 All right, so that does the sending mail, and 7:01 then I also want to send them a message on the website saying thank you for 7:02 your submission. 7:07 So we'll use the messages part of Django, 7:09 which lets us just put flash messages up onto the screen. 7:11 And we're gonna say add message. 7:15 And we're gonna put in request, 7:17 messages.SUCCESS cuz they successfully gave us a thing. 7:19 And we'll say, thanks for your suggestion! 7:24 And then finally and you're gonna get used to doing this a lot. 7:29 We're gonna return HttpResponseRedirect and we have to tell it where to go. 7:33 So we're gonna reverse the URL to suggestion. 7:40 Let me make sure I named that correctly. 7:43 Yep, all right and so what reverse does is 7:45 it goes to your URLs.py finds the URL that matches the name and 7:48 the arguments you give it and figures out the URL that comes from it. 7:52 Okay, so we already have this. 7:56 If it's a post then we're gonna do all this stuff. 7:59 We're gonna send the email, we're gonna send a message, and 8:00 then we're gonna redirect to somewhere else. 8:03 That redirect will be a get request, and so 8:05 we'll get a blank form instead of a form that already has some values filled out. 8:08 So let's just go ahead and submit this again. 8:15 And if everything worked. 8:17 I don't know, maybe I don't have the messages on there yet, but 8:19 let's look out here and let's refresh this. 8:23 And we should see suggestions, and then right here is a time stamp for 8:28 this thing and it's a log, it doesn't know what it is. 8:32 Let's rename this to .TXD. 8:38 And it should be able to show it to us. 8:42 Close those let's open this file again. 8:47 There we go. 8:49 All right so we can see it's from kenneth@example.com. 8:50 WIth the name of Kenneth and it's going to me at teamtreehouse and 8:54 the suggestion was Pygame. 8:57 You could obviously expand on this a lot further if you wanted to. 8:59 And so our message didn't show up and I'm really not sure why. 9:03 But I'm gonna add in a snippet for that. 9:08 And then we will refresh our thing. 9:12 Cuz this is just way too much code for me to type on camera. 9:18 So let's refresh. 9:23 There we go. 9:24 Thanks for your suggestion, and 9:24 we've got a little close button that doesn't do anything. 9:26 All right, cool. 9:28 So this'll be in the workspace if you wanna launch the workspace and 9:29 see what's in there. 9:34 This is all explained in Django's documentation. 9:35 I'll put a link to that in the teacher's notes. 9:38 There's a really common shortcut of creating a form with request.POST or 9:41 None, and then checking the validity of the form. 9:46 If it's invalid, you're in a GET request, at least, that's the idea. 9:48 The problem is that it's 100% possible to have a completely valid blank form. 9:53 It's also possible that the request wasn't a POST. 9:58 Both of these things leave your view in a somewhat ambiguous state. 10:01 Its better to be explicit like our if that checked the requests type, 10:04 than to hope you remember your edge case, 10:08