Making widget type accessible in template

[Selwin Ong]

Hi there,

Is there a possibility to add a type attribute to form widgets? The goal is to make it easy for designers to apply different styles to each widget type while keeping the template code DRY.

Django's current source code already does something similar for "<input>" based widgets such as TextInput and DateInput (though for a different purpose). These widgets have input_type attribute attached to them so we can already do:

<ul>
{% for field in form %}
    <li class = '{{ field.field.widget.input_type }}'>
        {{ field }}
    </li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>

But the above means we can only target input based widgets and not select, textarea etc. If we add a more generic type (e.g "select", "checkbox", "textarea") attribute to widgets, we'll be able to do:

<ul>
{% for field in form %}
    <li class = '{{ field.field.widget.type }}'>
        {{ field }}
    </li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>

Or even better (if we attach widgets to BoundField):

<ul>
{% for field in form %}
    <li class = '{{ field.widget.type }}'>
        {{ field }}
    </li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>

If it sounds like a good idea, I'd be more than willing to try writing a patch for this.

[Aymeric Augustin]

It's already possible to apply arbitrary CSS classes to widgets:
​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/stable/ref/forms/widgets/#django.forms.Widget.attrs