Contact form classes¶
There are two contact-form classes included in django-contact-form; one provides all the infrastructure for a contact form, and will usually be the base class for subclasses which want to extend or modify functionality. The other is a subclass which adds spam filtering to the contact form.
The ContactForm class¶
- class django_contact_form.forms.ContactForm¶
The base contact form class from which all contact form classes should inherit.
If you don’t need any customization, you can use this form to provide basic contact-form functionality; it will collect name, email address and message.
The
ContactFormViewincluded in this application knows how to work with this form and can handle many types of subclasses as well (see below for a discussion of the important points), so in many cases it will be all that you need. If you’d like to use this form or a subclass of it from one of your own views, here’s how:When you instantiate the form, pass the current
HttpRequestobject as the keyword argument request; this is used internally by the base implementation, and also made available so that subclasses can add functionality which relies on inspecting the request (such as spam filtering).To send the message, call the form’s
save()method, which accepts the keyword argument fail_silently and defaults it to False. This argument is passed directly to Django’ssend_mail()function, and allows you to suppress or raise exceptions as needed for debugging. Thesave()method has no return value.
Other than that, treat it like any other form; validity checks and validated data are handled normally, through the
is_valid()method and thecleaned_datadictionary.Under the hood, this form uses a somewhat abstracted interface in order to make it easier to subclass and add functionality.
The following attributes play a role in determining behavior, and any of them can be implemented as an attribute or as a method (for example, if you wish to have
from_emailbe dynamic, you can implement a method namedfrom_email()instead of setting the attributefrom_email).- from_email¶
The email address (
str) to use in the From: header of the message. By default, this is the value of the Django settingDEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL.
- recipient_list¶
A
listof recipients for the message. By default, this is the email addresses specified in the settingMANAGERS.
- subject_template_name¶
A
str, the name of the template to use when rendering the subject line of the message. By default, this is django_contact_form/contact_form_subject.txt.
- template_name¶
A
str, the name of the template to use when rendering the body of the message. By default, this is django_contact_form/contact_form.txt.
And two methods are involved in producing the contents of the message to send:
- message()¶
Returns the body of the message to send. By default, this is accomplished by rendering the template name specified in
template_name.- Return type
str
- subject()¶
Returns the subject line of the message to send. By default, this is accomplished by rendering the template name specified in
subject_template_name.- Return type
str
Warning
Subject must be a single line
The subject of an email is sent in a header (named Subject:). Because email uses newlines as a separator between headers, newlines in the subject can cause it to be interpreted as multiple headers; this is the header injection attack. To prevent this,
subject()will always force the subject to a single line of text, stripping all newline characters. If you overridesubject(), be sure to either do this manually, or usesuper()to call the parent implementation.Finally, the message itself is generated by the following two methods:
- get_message_dict()¶
This method loops through
from_email,recipient_list,message()andsubject(), collecting those parts into a dictionary with keys corresponding to the arguments to Django’s send_mail function, then returns the dictionary. Overriding this allows essentially unlimited customization of how the message is generated. Note that for compatibility, implementations which override this should support callables for the values offrom_emailandrecipient_list.- Return type
dict
- get_message_context()¶
Warning
Renamed method
Prior to django-contact-form 2.x, this method was named get_context(). It was renamed to get_message_context() in django-contact-form 2.0. See the upgrade guide for details.
For methods which render portions of the message using templates (by default,
message()andsubject()), generates the context used by those templates. The default context will be aRequestContext(using the current HTTP request, so user information is available), plus the contents of the form’scleaned_datadictionary, and one additional variable:- site
If django.contrib.sites is installed, the currently-active
Siteobject. Otherwise, aRequestSiteobject generated from the request.
- Return type
dict
Meanwhile, the following attributes/methods generally should not be overridden; doing so may interfere with functionality, may not accomplish what you want, and generally any desired customization can be accomplished in a more straightforward way through overriding one of the attributes/methods listed above.
- request¶
The
HttpRequestobject representing the current request. This is set automatically in __init__(), and is used both to generate aRequestContextfor the templates and to allow subclasses to engage in request-specific behavior.
- save()¶
If the form has data and is valid, will send the email, by calling
get_message_dict()and passing the result to Django’ssend_mail()function.
Note that subclasses which override __init__ or
save()need to accept *args and **kwargs, and pass them viasuper(), in order to preserve behavior (each of those methods accepts at least one additional argument, and this application expects and requires them to do so).