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I have a form with a DateField. The existing date value is formatted to render like this:

2009-10-03

How can I format that so that it look like this:

03.10.2009

I found a widget which renders it like this, but validation doesn't allow the values I enter then.

Jason Aller
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4 Answers4

37

To display initial field value properly formatted, use DateInput widget. To customize validation, use input_formats keyword argument of DateField.

Why do you need both format and input_formats?

format - The format in which this field’s initial value will be displayed. See here.

input_formats - A list of formats used to attempt to convert a string to a valid datetime.date object. See here.

radtek
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Cat Plus Plus
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    Thanks this worked... It looks like this now: my_date = forms.DateField(initial=date.today(), widget=forms.DateInput(format = '%d.%m.%Y'), input_formats=('%d.%m.%Y',)) –  Oct 03 '09 at 13:37
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    Note: I believe this works only with Django 1.1 and above. I'm using 1.0. – dfrankow Nov 01 '09 at 16:14
  • Why is it that both format and input_formats are necessary? – radtek Sep 12 '14 at 15:08
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    A note for whoever sees this all these years after the original question. Careful with this: `initial=date.today()`. By having the parenthesis you are effectively calling the function immediately, which means the default date for that field will be the date when the code is executed (whenever you start the WSGI server). I suspect this is not what you want and if so you should remove the parenthesis so that Django only calls `date.today` when it instantiates a new model. – borfast Dec 17 '16 at 15:19
  • @radtek, format property is for the rendering of the date inside the input, while input_formats is used to define the valid format to be accepted – Ahmed Farahat Dec 27 '16 at 12:46
  • @AhmedFarahat See my explanation provided – radtek Dec 30 '16 at 19:27
13

Method 1 : manual format rendering but fails datefield format validation

So best formating solution for you would be "." 

{{field.value.day|stringformat:"02d"}}.{{field.value.month|stringformat:"02d"}}.{{field.value.year}}

to get 24.05.2010

I added stringformat:"02d" to not get 25.5.2010 as output value.

I post the full code of a field to get an idea :

<input class="form-control" data-inputmask="'mask':'99.99.9999'" data-toggle="masked"  name="{{field.html_name}}" placeholder="{{ field.label }}" {% if field.field.required %}required=""{% endif%} type="text" value="{{field.value.day|stringformat:"02d"}}.{{field.value.month|stringformat:"02d"}}.{{field.value.year}}" " >

I mainly used this formatting for the date value on an existing instance of an update (model) form (UpdateView class).

This solution may fail when submitting the update form if it will not satisfy the format

Method 2 : (Better) automatize field value formatting + correct validation using settings

It's done by adding custom local settings to settings.py file : The most important part is the DATE_INPUT_FORMATS tuple

..
..
USE_L10N = True
..

DATE_INPUT_FORMATS = (
    '%d.%m.%Y', '%d.%m.%Y', '%d.%m.%y',  # '25.10.2006', '25.10.2006', '25.10.06'
    '%d-%m-%Y', '%d/%m/%Y', '%d/%m/%y',  # '25-10-2006', '25/10/2006', '25/10/06'
    '%d %b %Y',  # '25 Oct 2006', 
    '%d %B %Y',  # '25 October 2006', 
)

DATE_FORMAT = 'j F Y'
TIME_FORMAT = 'H:i'
DATETIME_FORMAT = 'j F Y H:i'
YEAR_MONTH_FORMAT = 'F Y'
MONTH_DAY_FORMAT = 'j F'
SHORT_DATE_FORMAT = 'j N Y'
SHORT_DATETIME_FORMAT = 'j N Y H:i'
FIRST_DAY_OF_WEEK = 1

The most important:

  1. The validation of datefields is done on insert and update with all formats present in DATE_INPUT_FORMATS tuple
  2. On updateView, the date field will be rendered using the first format of DATE_INPUT_FORMATS tuple (i mean using DATE_INPUT_FORMATS[0] == '%d.%m.%Y')

So the choice of the first element is important in this tuple as it defines the formating of existing value of datefield on update forms

You can apply javascript validation on UpdateViews using this first format too.

Tested on django 1.6 and 1.7 , don't know for previous versions

Cherif KAOUA
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6

Subclass custom field like this:

class CustomDateField(forms.DateField):
  def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
    kwargs.setdefault('input_formats', ("%d.%m.%Y",))
    super(CustomDateField, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
sorki
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4

You can show date in template by means of

{{ your_object.date_field.day }}.{{ your_object.date_field.month }}.{{ your_object.date_field.year }}
qscgyjqscgyj
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