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You are creating a ModelForm
subclass. A model form has to have a model to work from, and the Meta
object configures this.
Configuration like this is grouped into the Meta
class to avoid name clashes; that way you can have a model
field in your form without that interfering with the configuration. In other words, by using class Meta:
you get a nested namespace used just to configure the ModelForm
in relation to the model.
The namespace for the ModelForm
class body itself then (outside Meta
) is reserved for the form fields themselves, as well as form methods. You’d normally just let ModelForm
generate those fields from your model, but you can, in principle, add fields to this. Another reason to put fields in the class is to completely replace any of the generated fields with your own version.
From the Model Forms documentation:
ModelForm
is a regularForm
which can automatically generate certain fields. The fields that are automatically generated depend on the content of theMeta
class and on which fields have already been defined declaratively. Basically,ModelForm
will only generate fields that are missing from the form, or in other words, fields that weren’t defined declaratively.Fields defined declaratively are left as-is, therefore any customizations made to
Meta
attributes such aswidgets
,labels
,help_texts
, orerror_messages
are ignored; these only apply to fields that are generated automatically.
Because ModelForm
expects the configuration to be set under the Meta
name, you can’t just remove that and put model
and fields
in the ModelForm
class itself; that’s just the wrong place.