Valid use of django formset? - django

I have a many to many link between Foos and Bars. I don't particularly like the multi select widget so was thinking of having a widget which allows selecting a single Bar and a button to add more choice fields.
From what I've been reading formsets may be the answer. Is it valid to have a formset made up of a form with only one choice field or is there a better way to get the behaviour I'm looking for?

I wouldn't worry about the quantity of fields in the form. If your 'child' model only has the one field, then I'd say it's perfectly valid to use an formset with single field forms in this application.
You should take a look at inline formsets, they should help with exactly what you need. Although I'm not 100% sure they work for M2M...
additional thought: If it doesn't inline forsmet doesn't work directly with M2M, you can just use a model formset, and manually save the relationship in your view after using formset.save(commit=False). docs: formset saving

Related

How to display a custom form with multiple widgets for a field in Django admin?

The Django docs say you can add a form to the admin UI:
class ArticleAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
form = MyArticleAdminForm
I want a custom editing UI for a special field in my model, where I display multiple widgets. (It's not exactly the same, but an analogy might be an old-school hex editor widget, where you want fine editing control on a big blob of information.) Perhaps I could break the multiple values into multiple database objects and use an InlineAdmin, but I have app-specific reasons to not do that.
I thought I'd use a Form object with some custom fields, but Django says it must be a ModelForm:
<class 'myapp.admin.MyAdmin'>: (admin.E016) The value of 'form' must inherit from 'BaseModelForm'.
Is it possible to display multiple widgets (basically a very custom form) for a single model value in Django admin?
EDIT: It looks like MultiWidget might work? I'm gonna look into that. Also, this question is related. That suggests I should just change the widget on the field.
The answer was to make a MultiWidget, overriding:
__init__ to set up the widgets
decompress and value_from_datadict to unpack and pack the field value
template_name to render my own template
get_context to make the context for the template

Specifying specific form format in Django

I am using materializecss to give my django site some material elements. I have put together a form (the 'old' way using html) but now realised I need to use a django form instead. The problem is, these forms don't play well with materialises built in column system (they use classes to determine rows and column spacing). Here is an example of the layout I set up so far. However when defining the form through form.py, it spits out one input per layer.
My question is: what can I do to either a) get django to work with the html-defined form or b) make a 'form template' to give the input fields the appropriate classes?
If you want to see the code I can post some but I'm quite a new coder so it's messy.
Thanks!
There are three ways I can think of off the top of my head.
If you want full control over the HTML form, in a Django template or HTML form, simply map the names of your fields to match the underlying field names in the Django form. This way, when POSTed back to your view, Django will automatically link up the POSTed fields with the Django form fields.
For example, if you have a field username in your Django form (or Django model if using ModelForm), you could have an element <input type="text" name="username" maxlength="40"> (that you can style any way you need) on your HTML form that Django will happily parse into your Django form field, assuming your view is plumbed correctly. There is an example of this method in the Django documentation.
Another way is to customize the Django form field widgets in your Django form definition. The Django documentation talks a little bit about how to do this. This is great for one offs, but is probably not the best approach if you expect to reuse widgets.
The final approach would be to subclass Django form field widgets to automatically provide whatever attributes you need. For example, we use Bootstrap and have subclassed nearly all of the widgets we use to take advantage of Bootstrap classes.
class BootstrapTextInput(forms.TextInput):
def __init__(self, attrs=None):
final_attrs = {'class': 'form-control'}
if attrs is not None:
final_attrs.update(attrs)
super().__init__(attrs=final_attrs)
Then it's simply a matter of letting the Django form know which widget to use for your form field.
class UsernameForm(forms.ModelForm):
class Meta:
model = auth.get_user_model()
fields = ['username']
widgets = {'username': BootstrapTextInput()}
Hope this helps. Cheers!

django generic view update/create: update works but create raises IntegrityError

I'm using CreateView and UpdateView directely into urls.py of my application whose name is dydict. In the file forms.py I'm using ModelForm and I'm exluding a couple of fields from being shown, some of which should be set when either creating or updating. So, as mentioned in the title, update part works but create part doesn't which is obvious because required fields that I have exluded are sent empty which is not allowed in my case. So the question here is, how should I do to fill exluded fields into the file forms.py so that I don't have to override CreateView?
Thanks in advance.
Well, you have to set your required fields somewhere. If you don't want them to be shown or editable in the form, your options are to set them in the view (by using a custom subclass of CreateView) or if appropriate to your design in the save method of the model class. Or declare an appropriate default value on the field in the model.
It would also work to allow the fields into the form, but set them to use HiddenInput widgets. That's not safe against malicious input, so I wouldn't do that for purely automated fields.
You cannot exclude fields, which are set as required in the model definition. You need to define blank=True/null=True for each of these model fields.
If this doesn't solve your issue, then please show us the model and form definitions, so we know exactly what the code looks like.

Django - Confirmation page before change of different models

I'd like to create a confirmation page for selected objects before a change is made to them (outside the admin). The objects can be of different models (but only one model a time).
This is much like what is done in administration before deletion. But the admin code is complex and I haven't grasped how it is done there.
First I have severall forms that filter the objects differently and then I pass the queryset to the action / confirmation page. I have created a form factory so that I can define different querysets depending on model (as seen in another similiar question here at Stackoverflow):
def action_factory(queryset):
''' Form factory that returns a form that allows user to change status on commissions (sale, lead or click)
'''
class _ActionForm(forms.Form):
items = forms.ModelMultipleChoiceField(queryset = queryset, widget=forms.HiddenInput())
actions = forms.ChoiceField(choices=(('A', 'Approve'), ('D' ,'Deny'), ('W' ,'Under review'), ('C' ,'Closed')))
return _ActionForm
Which I use in my view:
context['form']=action_factory(queryset)()
The problem is that the items field wont be displayed at all in the html-code when it is hidden. When I remove the HiddenInput widget it displays the form correctly.
I don't want to display the choice field since there can be thousands of objects. All I want to have is something like "Do you want to change the status of 1000 objects" and a popdown and a submit button. A simple enough problem it seems, but I can't get it to work.
If someone has a solution to my current attempt I would be glad to hear how they have done it. Even better would be if there is a cleaner and better solution.
I used the wrong widget. It should be MultipleHiddenInput not HiddenInput.

Limiting Django ModelChoiceField queryset to selected items

Here is what I've been struggling for a day...
I have a Message model in which recipients is a ManyToManyField to the User model.
Then there is a form for composing messages. As there are thousands of users, it is not convenient to display the options in a multiple select widget in the form, which is the default behavior. Instead, using FcbkComplete jquery plugin, I made the recipients field look like an input field where the user types the recipients, and it WORKS.
But...
Although not visible on the form page, all the user list is rendered into the page in the select field, which is something I don't want for obvious reasons.
I tried overriding the ModelChoiceField's behavior manipulating validation and queryset, I played with the MultipleChoice widget, etc. But none of them worked and felt natural.
So, what is the (best) way to avoid having the whole list of options on the client side, but still be able to validate against a queryset?
Have you seen django-ajax-selects? I've never used it, but it's in my mental grab bag for when I come across a problem like what it sounds like you're trying to solve...
I would be trying one of two ways (both of which might be bad! I'm really just thinking out aloud here):
Setting the field's queryset to be empty (queryset = Model.objects.none()) and having the jquery tool use ajax views for selecting/searching users. Use a clean_field function to manually validate the users are valid.
This would be my preferred choice: edit the template to not loop through the field's queryset - so the html would have 0 options inside the select tags. That is, not using form.as_p() method or anything.
One thing I'm not sure about is whether #2 would still hit the database, pulling out the 5k+ objects, just not displaying them in the html. I don't think it should, but... not sure, at all!
If you don't care about suggestions, and is OK to use the ID, Django Admin comes with a raw_id_field attribute for these situations.
You could also make a widget, that uses the username instead of the ID and returns a valid user. Something among the lines of:
# I haven't tested this code. It's just for illustration purposes
class RawUsernameField(forms.CharField):
def clean(self, value):
try:
return User.objects.get(username=value)
except User.DoesNotExist:
rause forms.ValidationError(u'Invalid Username')
I solve this by overriding the forms.ModelMultipleChoiceField's default widget. The new widget returns only the selected fields, not the entire list of options:
class SelectMultipleUserWidget(forms.SelectMultiple):
def render_options(self, choices, selected_choices):
choices = [c for c in self.choices if str(c[0]) in selected_choices]
self.choices = choices
return super(SelectMultipleUserWidget,
self).render_options([], selected_choices)
class ComposeForm(forms.Form):
recipients = forms.ModelMultipleChoiceField(queryset=User.objects.all(),
widget=SelectMultipleUserWidget)
...