Django Model Forms with Multi-Level Foreign Keys - django

Question

I need to create a model form in Django and have the following arbitrary scenario.
Real Estates
============
ID
...some extra fields...
CityID
Cities
======
ID
Name
Region
======
ID
Name
Country
=======
ID
Name
What I would like to do is to let user choose the Country first, then Region and lastly the City. (Populate the child category with javascript after user selects the parent category.) However, I don't want to add the 'Region' and 'Country' fields to the 'Real Estate' table. The order of the fields are also important, that is, 1) Country, 2) Region and 3) City.
Can you suggest any approach to this? Thanks!

Answer 1

I'm assuming you are trying to show the user a limited set of options for "Region" after he selected a country and a limited set of options for "City" after he selected the region so as to provide a way to sensibly select a city for the real estate instead of having to pick something from a long list of random cities?
You could specify additional fields on the RealEstate ModelForm that aren't actual fields on the RealEstate model and provide logic in the form's .__init__() and if needed also in .clean() and .save() methods to take care of the additional fields. Perhaps something like this:
class Country(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(...)
class Region(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(...)
country = models.ForeignKey(Country, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
class City(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(...)
region = models.ForeignKey(Region, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
class RealEstate(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(...)
city = models.ForeignKey(City, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
class RealEstateForm(forms.ModelForm):
country = forms.ChoiceField(required=False)
region = forms.ChoiceField(required=False)
class Meta:
model = RealEstate
fields = ['name', 'city', 'country', 'region']
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
self.fields['country'].choices = Country.objects.all().values('id', 'name)
self.fields['region'].choices = Region.objects.all().values('id', 'name', 'country__id')
self.fields['city'].choices = City.objects.all().values('id', 'name', 'region__id', 'region__country__id')
Providing choices that include the referenced region ID and country ID for each city will allow you to filter these in the front end if you manage to use these choices as the user is selecting country and region without having to make a separate backend request to get the filtered list. Of course, you would end up with a larger response being sent this way in one go - if your data set size is very large (how many countries, how many regions, how many cities) this may not be wanted.