Textarea

Adding a Textarea to a form is straightforward:

from django import forms

from crispy_forms_gds.helper import FormHelper
from crispy_forms_gds.layout import Field, Layout, Size, Submit


class TextareaForm(forms.Form):

    description = forms.CharField(
        label="Can you provide more detail?",
        widget=forms.Textarea,
        help_text="Do not include personal or financial information, like your "
        "National Insurance number or credit card details.",
        error_messages={"required": "Enter a short description of your application"},
    )

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(TextareaForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self.helper = FormHelper()
        self.helper.layout = Layout(
            Field.textarea(
                "description",
                label_size=Size.LARGE,
                label_tag="h2",
                rows=3,
                max_words=100,
            ),
            Submit("submit", "Submit"),
        )

You can see this form live in the Demo site.

The HTML class simplifies the process of setting the attributes and template variables needed to render a <textarea>. Here we assume the textarea is going to be part of a multi-page form and displayed on a page by itself so we change the size of the label and promote it to be the page header by wrapping it in an <h1> heading. Also we set the number of rows to 3. Django renders textareas with a default of 10 rows but that is more than we need right now.

If that seems a little complicated, we could have just added the name of the field to the Layout:

self.helper.layout = Layout(
    "description",
    Submit("submit", "Submit"),
)