Question

I am using ModelForms to make forms for a website, but I want more control of what text is displayed in the Select box.

An example model could look like this

class Test(models.Model)
    ID = IntegerField()
    Label = CharacterField()
    recipient = ForeignKey(Person)
    product = ForeignKey(Product)

So, my problem is, that when I make a modelForm of this model, the foreign key fields are made into select fields, that has the primary key of the object in the underlying value, and the text displayed is the text from the objects __unicode__() method. In this case, only the product ID is displayed (this is a serial code number, which makes no sense to the user). I would like to be able to make a custom label like “[serial], [product name]”.

I can’t seem to find any pointers on the official Django documentation, so i wondered if anyone would help? 🙂

Answer 1

Check out the Django docs regarding the ModelChoiceField. Quote:

The __unicode__ method of the model will be called to generate string
representations of the objects for use in the field’s choices; to
provide customized representations, subclass ModelChoiceField and
override label_from_instance. This method will receive a model object,
and should return a string suitable for representing it. For example:

class MyModelChoiceField(ModelChoiceField):
    def label_from_instance(self, obj):
        return "My Object #%i" % obj.id