This kind of thing really attracted me to django, but then the usability of it goes entirely out the window when you take a closer look.
Formsets are basically a container for an arbitrary collection of forms. A form is a abstraction layer for UI, but I’ve seen they (or rather ModelForms) can be somewhat helpful as a funnel for POST vars and validation of the model. Maybe my issue is that the use I’ve found for them is not the primary concern people have.
from https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/to…
>>> ArticleFormSet = formset_factory(ArticleForm, formset=BaseArticleFormSet)
>>> data = {
... 'form-TOTAL_FORMS': u'2',
... 'form-INITIAL_FORMS': u'0',
... 'form-MAX_NUM_FORMS': u'',
... 'form-0-title': u'Test',
... 'form-0-pub_date': u'1904-06-16',
... 'form-1-title': u'Test',
... 'form-1-pub_date': u'1912-06-23',
... }
>>> formset = ArticleFormSet(data)
>>> formset.is_valid()
See, how you would expect something like this to work is it would take in a list, or at least a dict with a list. But no, they have you cat “form-n-” to the field name. This is just so sloppy I have to point it out.
They spent so much time figuring out how to take away customizability from the front end, they weren’t paying attention to the backend.