The first argument of every Django view is the HttpRequest object, which by convention is named request. It contains metadata about the request sent from a browser or other client, including such items as the current language code, user data, cookies, and session. By default, forms that are used by views accept the GET or POST data, files, initial data, and other parameters; however, they do not inherently have access to the HttpRequest object. In some cases, it is useful to additionally pass HttpRequest to the form, especially when you want to filter out the choices of form fields based on other request data or handle saving something such as the current user or IP in the form.

In this recipe, we will see an example of a form where, for added or changed ideas, the current user is saved as an author.