Question

I am making a custom form object in Django which has an overrided __init__ method. The purpose of overriding the method is to dynamically generate drop-down boxes based on the new parameters.

For example,

class TicketForm(forms.Form):
    Type = Type.GetTicketTypeField()

    def __init__(self, data=None, files=None, auto_id='id_%s', prefix=None,
                  initial=None, label_suffix=':', empty_permitted=False, 
                  ticket=None):

        if ticket:
           self.__class__.State = State.GetTicketStateField(ticket.Type)
           super(forms.BaseForm, self ).__init__(data=data, files=files, 
                  auto_id=auto_id, prefix=prefix, initial=initial, 
                  label_suffix=label_suffix, empty_permitted=empty_permitted)

This solution does not work. It appears that the fields are created before the __init__ is called. I would assume this problem would be pretty common. What would be the Django way of handling these classes of problems.

Answer 1

You can dynamically modify your form by using the self.fields dict. Something like this may work for you:

class TicketForm(forms.Form):

  Type = Type.GetTicketTypeField()

  def __init__(self, ticket, *args, **kwargs):
    super(TicketForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
    self.fields['state'] = State.GetTicketStateField(ticket.Type)