Django Modals

Do you want modal forms? Love abstraction? Make things easy with django-modals!

I really love Twitter's bootstrap, and use modals all the time to display forms. Manually adding forms to a view is a giant pain. You've got to override get_context_data() and slip in your form, and then do the same with post() to grap the result.

That all sounds easy enough the first time. But then you add another form to the same view, and you find yourself distinuishing between forms by the submit button name, or a hidden field. It's time to abstract!

Django Modal's ModalMixin tidies up that messy code, and allows you to neatly define subclasses of Modal, instances of which are included in the template context. A Modal subclass defines a template to use for rendering the modal in HTML, only handles data from a specific modal form, and defines methods for valid and invalid form data handling:

import modals

class MyThingModal(modals.Modal):
    form_class = MyThingForm
    template_name = 'app/my_thing_modal.html'

    def valid(self, form):
        form.save()
        # Do other work here

    def invalid(self, form):
        # Take other action

I'm figuring out the best approach, and it's not functional yet. But I think this is a useful abstraction to make.