Django forms.DateInput does not apply the attributes given in attrs field

Placeholder, class not getting set when tried to apply through the django’s attrs specifier for forms.DateInput

The form is a ModelForm.

And according to the docs

Takes same arguments as TextInput, with one more optional argument:

Here is the code :

widgets = {
   'my_date_field': forms.DateInput(format=('%d-%m-%Y'), 
                    attrs={'class':'myDateClass', 
                           'placeholder':'Select a date'}
                    )
}

The same is applied for a forms.TextInput and it works just fine.

What am I missing here?

Just anybody wants a full class code :

class trademark_form(ModelForm):
    my_date_field = DateField(input_formats=['%d-%m-%Y'])
    class Meta:
        model = myModel

        widgets = {
                   'my_date_field': forms.DateInput(format=('%d-%m-%Y'), attrs={'class':'myDateClass', 'placeholder':'Select a date'}),
                   'field1': forms.TextInput(attrs={'class':'textInputClass', 'placeholder':'Enter a Value..'}),
                   'field2': forms.TextInput(attrs={'class':'textInputClass', 'placeholder':'Enter a Value..', 'readonly':'readonly', 'value':10}),
                   'desc': forms.Textarea(attrs={'class':'textAreaInputClass', 'placeholder':'Enter desc', 'rows':5}),

               }
        exclude = ('my_valid_field')

The generated HTML for the field, my_date_field :

<input type="text" id="id_my_date_field" name="my_date_field">

The generated HTML for the field, field1 :

<input type="text" name="field1" class="textInputClass" placeholder="Enter a Value.." id="id_field1">

Answer

Since you didn’t post your form code, my best guess is that you explicitly instantiated a form field like this confirmed my guess by posting the code that looks roughly like this:

class MyForm(forms.ModelForm):
    my_date_field = forms.DateField()

    class Meta:
        model = MyModel
        widgets = {
            'my_date_field': forms.DateInput(format=('%d-%m-%Y'), 
                                             attrs={'class':'myDateClass', 
                                            'placeholder':'Select a date'})
        }

I can say that it’s not working because if you explicitly instantiate a form field like this, Django assumes that you want to completely define form field behavior; therefore, you can’t use the widgets attribute of the inner Meta class.

The note at the end of section about overriding the default field types or widgets states that:

Fields defined declaratively are left as-is, therefore any customizations made to Meta attributes such as widgets, labels, help_texts, or error_messages are ignored; these only apply to fields that are generated automatically.