BoundField 'value' method should be consistent

Using Django Forms & APIs
1

It seems odd to me and caused a little of a headache that BoundField’s value method returns different values for GET and POST.

I am using a DateField and for initial the value is python datetime.date. However, I am doing asynchronous validation and when the form is initialized using the POST data the value of my date field is a string.

This caused issues because in the template I was passing the field.value into the date template filter like so: field.value|date:"Y-m-d". The date filter requires the value to be a date or it returns nothing. The inconsistency was frustrating.

Why not always transform the data using the field’s to_python method that way it is consistent?

FYI if it makes it easier:

    def value(self):
        """
        Return the value for this BoundField, using the initial value if
        the form is not bound or the data otherwise.
        """
        data = self.initial
        if self.form.is_bound:
            data = self.field.bound_data(self.data, data)
        return self.field.prepare_value(data)