Formfield doesn't display default value

[ross@…]

If my model contains this:

currency = meta.CharField(maxlength=4,default="Foo")

And a form template does this:

{{form.currency}}

I'd expect the resulting input widget to be pre-initialised to "Foo". However, it isn't.

[Adrian Holovaty]

The formfields framework is decoupled from models.

[antisvin@…]

Now that there's formfield method especially for generating forms from model fields, initial values can be easily obtained from model.Obvious patch attached.

[antisvin@…]

Use get_default model fields method to set initial values for forms.

[Brian Rosner <brosner@…>]

Marked #4019 as duplicate of this. It appears the patch on #4019 is essentially the same thing as this one.

[David Danier <goliath.mailinglist@…>]

Sorry for the duplicate, I really didn't see this one year old ticket.

About the patches:
If I read ModelField.get_default() right this returns "" (empty string) as an last option, even if no default is provided. ModelField.get_default() actually generates some default if no default is provided. That's why I tested Field.has_default() in my code. Even if this has no real consequence in HTML-forms (value="" is the default that gets sent by the browser if no input is made), it only seemed unclean to me, because FormField.initial is different to ModelField.default, but it looks the same and may lead to confusion or mistakes (when working with the forms outside of some generic views/the admin).

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

This looks like the right approach for newforms, but it needs tests before it can be committed. Doesn't need to test every field, but it should show how the functionality works for a couple of examples so that we can verify we don't break it.

In particular, I would like to see that in the case of form_for_instance() constructing the form, we don't use the default values, but, rather, use the existing values from the instance attributes, whatever they may be. So having tests for a form_for_model() and a form_for_instance() case would be the minimu required here.

[David Danier <goliath.mailinglist@…>]

This should do it for current trunk (formfield() nicely refactored using super())

[Philippe Raoult]

same patch against trunk, but with the tests requested by Malcolm

[Philippe Raoult]

I added regression tests to make sure we get the expected behavior in both form_for_model (default from the class's field) and form_for_instance (instance value).

[Philippe Raoult]

#4967 is a duplicate, closed in favor of this one

[James Bennett]

A user on IRC reports that the patch works and tests pass, so marking ready for checkin.

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

(In [6568]) Fixed #899 -- Use model field default values as formfield initial values in
form_for_model(). Patch from David Danier and PhiR. Thanks.