[FIXED] HTML/Flask - Stop text in textarea being removed when submitting form?

Issue

I thought this would be simple, but maybe not.

I have a form in HTML called home.html which contains the following form:

<form method="POST">
  <textarea name="query_text" id="query_text" class="form-control"></textarea>
  <button type="submit" name="submit" class="btn btn-primary">Submit</button>
</form>

I then have a python file called views.py with the following text:

@views.route('/', methods=['GET', 'POST'])
def home():
    if request.method == 'POST':
        query_text = request.form.get('query_text')
        db.session.add(query_text)
        db.session.commit()

        return render_template("home.html")

This is all working great. However as the render_template reloads the page, it removes the text in the textarea. This is an unwanted behaviour as I want the user to tweak the query, rather than remember and write it out again.

Is there a way of leaving the text in place when submitting?

Solution

Figured it out finally. Going to leave here for anyone in the future:

Added a new variable in the render_template called foo_bar which has the text from the textarea:

return render_template("home.html", foo_bar = query_text)

I then added that variable 'foo_bar' within 2 curly brackets to be treated as a variable if it exists as the textarea text:

<form method="POST">
  <textarea name="query_text" id="query_text" class="form-control">{{ foo_bar }}</textarea>
  <button type="submit" name="submit" class="btn btn-primary">Submit</button>
</form>

This works perfectly

Answered By - Nicholas