Django Forms CheckboxInput on Y/N String field in existing database - django

Question

I'm relatively new to Django, and I'm making a form which I'm connecting to a existing MySQL database.
What I'm trying to do is create a maintenance page for countries. One of the fields in my database is eu_member_state.
What I'm trying to do here is create a checkbox for this field, so I can uncheck it for the United Kingdom which recently got out of the EU.
class CountryForm(forms.ModelForm):
class Meta():
model = Countries
fields = '__all__'
widgets = {
'eu_member_state': forms.CheckboxInput()
}
The checkbox does appear on my form, but how can I make this talk to my database? How can this checkbox only be checked when the database value is 'Y', and how do I write this back to my database on save, so 'Y' when checked and 'N' when unchecked?
This is the model code:
from django.db import models
class Countries(models.Model):
country = models.CharField(unique=True, max_length=3)
descr = models.CharField(max_length=50, blank=True, null=True)
descrshort = models.CharField(max_length=20, blank=True, null=True)
country_2char = models.CharField(max_length=2, blank=True, null=True)
eu_member_state = models.CharField(max_length=1, blank=False, null=False, default='N')
class Meta:
db_table = 'countries'
verbose_name_plural = "countries"
def __str__(self):
return self.descr

Answer 1

I managed to work around it by creating a custom CheckboxInput field and initialise this in the forms.py.
class CountryForm(forms.ModelForm):
eu_member_state_flag = forms.BooleanField(required=False,label='EU member state')
class Meta():
model = Countries
exclude = ('eu_member_state',)
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
super(CountryForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
if self.instance.eu_member_state == "Y":
flag_value = True
else:
flag_value = False
self.initial['eu_member_state_flag'] = flag_value
Then in views.py I'm fetching the value of the CheckboxInput field and convert that into a 'Y' or a 'N'.
class UpdateCountryView(LoginRequiredMixin,UpdateView):
login_url= '/login/'
redirect_field_name = 'tour_admin/countries_list.html'
form_class = CountryForm
model = Countries
def form_valid(self, form):
if form.is_valid():
data = form.cleaned_data
if data['eu_member_state_flag']:
data['eu_member_state'] = 'Y'
self.object.eu_member_state = 'Y'
else:
data['eu_member_state'] = 'N'
self.object.eu_member_state = 'N'
self.object.save()
return HttpResponseRedirect(self.get_success_url())
def get_success_url(self):
return reverse('countries_list')