Tags in forms

The TaggableManager will show up automatically as a field in a ModelForm or in the admin. Tags input via the form field are parsed as follows:

  • If the input doesn’t contain any commas or double quotes, it is simply treated as a space-delimited list of tag names.
  • If the input does contain either of these characters:
    • Groups of characters which appear between double quotes take precedence as multi-word tags (so double quoted tag names may contain commas). An unclosed double quote will be ignored.
    • Otherwise, if there are any unquoted commas in the input, it will be treated as comma-delimited. If not, it will be treated as space-delimited.

Examples:

Tag input string Resulting tags Notes
apple ball cat ["apple", "ball", "cat"] No commas, so space delimited
apple, ball cat ["apple", "ball cat"] Comma present, so comma delimited
“apple, ball” cat dog ["apple, ball", "cat", "dog"] All commas are quoted, so space delimited
“apple, ball”, cat dog ["apple, ball", "cat dog"] Contains an unquoted comma, so comma delimited
apple “ball cat” dog ["apple", "ball cat", "dog"] No commas, so space delimited
“apple” “ball dog ["apple", "ball", "dog"] Unclosed double quote is ignored

commit=False

If, when saving a form, you use the commit=False option you’ll need to call save_m2m() on the form after you save the object, just as you would for a form with normal many to many fields on it:

if request.method == "POST":
    form = MyFormClass(request.POST)
    if form.is_valid():
        obj = form.save(commit=False)
        obj.user = request.user
        obj.save()
        # Without this next line the tags won't be saved.
        form.save_m2m()

You can check the details over in the Django documentation on form saving.