Django set form initial data in view - django

Question

I'm trying to populate a django modelform with initial data provided from an external source. To achieve that I start by pull all the needed data from the external source:
url =('http://myapi.example.com')
data = urllib2.urlopen(url)
result = json.load(data)
api_data_name = result['properties']['name']
api_data_type = result['properties']['type']
Followed by populating a dict which will serve as initial data to my form:
data = {}
for field in my_model._meta.fields:
if field.name == 'name':
data[field.name] = api_data_name
form = MyEditForm(initial=data)
Then I'm passing the form to the template and the initial data is populating my text fields as expected, but now I need to be able to set a value of a select field based on a string I receive from my external source and Im not getting how can I achieve that, since doing something like:
if field.name == 'type':
data[field.name] = api_data_type
Wont do the job cause the select element has "0", "1", "2", etc as options value and not the long description i get from api_data_type variable.
How can I get the long_description from all the options <option value="1">long_description</option> of my select field in my view so i can compare each one with api_data_type?
Heres a sample of my models.py and forms.py:
#models.py
TYPE = (
('0',_(u'Type1')),
('1',_(u'Type2')),
('2',_(u'Type3')),
)
class MyModel(models.Model):
...
type=models.CharField(max_length=30,choices=TYPE,blank=True)
...
#forms.py
class MyEditForm(forms.ModelForm):
class Meta:
model = MyModel
widgets = {
...
'type': Select(attrs={'class':'select-small span2'}),
...
}

Answer 1

Found out how to accomplish what I asked.
# For select fields
if field.name == 'classification':
for choice in field.choices:
if choice[1].lower() == api_poi_classification.lower():
data[field.name] = choice[0]
And for any of ya trying to populate many-to-many fields (as checkboxes in my case)
# Many to many fields populate
for field in hotel_poi._meta.many_to_many:
if field.name == 'views':
if u'Vista' in api_poi_review_fields:
api_vistas = api_poi_review[u'Vista']
# The api_vistas string comes from api in the format (v1; v2; v3; v4)
views = api_vistas.split(';')
choices = field.get_choices()
temp = []
for view in views:
for choice in choices:
if view.lower().strip() == choice[1].lower().strip():
temp.append(choice[0])
data[field.name]=temp
All of this could be avoided if I had direct database access... In that case i would just need to set an object instance like m = MyModel.objects.filter(id=1) and call form = MyEditForm(instance=m)
But that was not the case and that's what makes this question a bit particular.