Custom field error from try/except in Django view?

Question

I have a form for geocoding an address in my app. If a non-address is entered, the geocoder raises a "GQueryError". Using try/except I'd like to catch this error and send a custom error back to the form that would show up in the "errorlist" like the other errors and be appropriately displayed and styled. Can this be done?

Answer 1

You should write a clean_field_name method and in it capture the error and raise a ValidationError e.g

class MyForm(forms.Form):
    ...
    # rest of the form
    ...

    def clean_address(self):
        address = self.cleaned_data['address']
        try:
            address = geo_clean(address)
        except GQueryError,e:
            raise forms.ValidationError("ooops you are so wrong, %s!"%e)

        return address

Read how to clean specific fields