Django Form Fields

The Django Python web application framework comes with almost every component that one might need to construct a full-featured application. One common component of web applications are widgets. Widgets are similarly defined in most desktop GUI libraries. A widget is simply a smaller part of the GUI whole. Widgets typically have a tightly defined concept and purpose. For example, a button widget is meant to be clicked. Also, a button widget is also meant to be visually striking enough that it is obvious that it is meant to be clicked. Django comes with a set of widgets that are featured in almost every web application in one way or another.

Web applications generally contain forms. Nobody has gotten away with using the web without having to fill out a form at some point. The pieces of these forms are often referred to as fields. This is from a data or domain perspective. When talking about a field, you are generally talking about what data that field contains, how that data is validated and so on. When talking about widgets in a form, you are generally talking about the visual aspect, like what can this widget do and how does it look when it does it.

Django provides abstractions within the framework for both of these concepts. The two concepts are closely related and thus tightly coupled. In this particular situation, tight coupling is absolutely necessary. You can't have a field without a widget and vice-versa. The alternative would be to implement all the field functionality inside the widget abstraction which would give us something bloated and hard to understand. Modularity is a good thing even when tight coupling is necessary. The two classes representing these concepts are Widget and Field. The two classes and how they are related to one another are illustrated below.