Add example to documentation of a DateInput with input_type='date'

[dennisvang]

Rationale

By default, the ​forms.widgets.DateInput widget renders as a simple text field.

However, a "date picker", like ​the one implemented in contrib.admin is often much more convenient.

Fortunately it is now possible to take advantage of the browser's built-in date picker, using the HTML ​<input type='date'> element.

The only problem is that, although the default DateInput can be easily modified to use the <input type='date'> element, this may not be so obvious to people unfamiliar with the inner workings of Django (e.g. ​forms.widgets.Input.input_type).

Moreover, some people may not even know the HTML type='date' exists, nor that ​browsers have built-in date pickers.

Request

I believe it would be very helpful if the documentation included an example, like these two provided by Tim Graham in ticket #33100:

class DateInput(forms.DateInput):
    input_type = 'date'

or

DateInput(attrs={'type': 'date'})

This has the additional advantage of documenting the use of the forms.widgets.Input.input_type attribute, which ​appears in the documentation but is not mentioned explicitly in the text, as far as I see.

If necessary, I would be willing to prepare a pull request for this.

[Claude Paroz]

Yes, please. A note about why Django doesn't use this input type by default would be nice too.

[dennisvang]

Replying to Claude Paroz:

Yes, please. A note about why Django doesn't use this input type by default would be nice too.

Working on it here: ​https://github.com/dennisvang/django/tree/ticket_33113

Would something like ​this do?

I'm not quite sure how to explain why input_type = 'date' is not the default.

[dennisvang]

Pull request: ​https://github.com/django/django/pull/14905

[Carlton Gibson]

Claude mention the discussion on #16630 on the PR which should touch on the why it's still a type=text by default.

[Claude Paroz]

#33165 is a typical issue showing the difficulty of the date input. So the simple widget subclass with input_type = 'date' is NOT sufficient to make it work properly. The initial input value must also be converted to the YYYY-MM-DD format to comply with the ​specs.

[Carlton Gibson]

There was a ​mailing list discussion raising some points, as well as those here and on the PR.

Capturing those succinctly is the remaining task here.

[Natalia Bidart]

Pinged PR author to see if we can revive this effort (following recent ticket #34853).