Question

django-smart-selects is an elegant solution that enables Django developers to have chained select inputs in their forms. But as reported by developers in its list of issues, it does not work well when used in formsets.

The javascript it renders is tied to the id of the “chained field” right in the model definition.

How do you think this can be made to work when used in formsets? I think the render method of the widget (please see the django-smart-selects code) needs to somehow be made aware of formsets (and ideally, form prefixes). But how?

Answer 1

I tried this and it works — In the widgets.py file of django-smart-selects code, simply copy the section that deals with rendering javascript and delete it from the file. Remove the line that concatenates this (now deleted) javascript to the output.

For your formsets, do the complete rendering yourself. That is, in your template don’t just do {{ form }} or {{ formset }} or whatever, but explicitly lay out all individual fields by doing {{ form.field }} in a {% for form in formset.forms %} loop.

Paste the javascript code that you copied over from widgets.py and customize it with the IDs in the javascript with {{ form.field.html_name }}

Write in your own customized urls in the javascript, following the pattern in the code.

Voila!