Custom rendering a radioselect in django form / accessing single element? - django

Question

I have a form like this:
CHOICES = [
('a', 'a_value'),
('b', 'b_value'),
('c', 'c_value')
]
self.fields["choice"] = forms.ChoiceField(
widget=RadioSelect(),
choices=CHOICES,
)
How can I select a single element of this form field in my template? I want to be able to do something like:
<tr><td>{{form.choice.a}}</td><td>some custom extra field</td></tr>
Or is there another way to change how the RadioSelect is rendered?

Answer 1

See full doc -
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/forms/widgets/#radioselect
{% for radio in form.my_radio_select %}
- {{ radio.choice_label }}
- {{ radio.tag }}
{% endfor %}

Answer 2

You cannot do this via parameters or something, the way it is rendered is hardcoded in its widget class! See eg. http://code.djangoproject.com/browser/django/trunk/django/forms/widgets.py: RadioSelect.render (->RadioFieldRenderer.render); subclass it and override the render method, then use it in your form myfield = forms.MultipleChoiceField(widget=MyWidget(...)).

Answer 3

I labored over this for a few hours trying to find some way to use a custom renderer on a RadioSelect, but there is no way to pass in the choice number. Instead I went for a kludgey, but simple approach. In added an __init__ function to my form:
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
super(FormName, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
self.radiofield_choice = re.findall(r'<li>(.+?)</li>',
unicode(self['radiofield_name']))
That uses the RadioSelect's default render to create the widget, and then parses out the individual choice HTML. You could even combine that with the defined choices to create a dictionary instead of a list.
In my template I used {{ form.radiofield_choice.0|safe }} to render just the first item. Increment the zero to get the other items.
If, for some reason, only the input fields without enclosing labels are needed, use r'(<input.+/>)'.