Question

I have a large django form. It has a lot of data that depends on a field being selected.

Eg:

Do you have a car? YES/NO dropdown box.

If yes, I want to show the additional fields make/model/year/cc etc etc

If no, I want to keep them hidden.

What is the best way to this? A simple show/hide div using jquery or is there something better that I should be doing?

Answer 1

Yes, you should use a simple show/hide with JQuery on the client side.
Then on the server side, you would need conditional validation in your form’s clean method, if you also want to make some fields required only if something else is selected.

For example:

class MyForm(Form):
    ...
    def clean(self):
        cleaned_data = self.cleaned_data
        has_car_required_fields = ['foo', 'bar', 'baz']
        if cleaned_data.has_key('has_car') and cleaned_data['has_car']:
            for field_name in has_car_required_fields:
                if not cleaned_data.has_key(field_name) or not cleaned_data[field_name]:
                    self._errors[field_name] = ErrorList([_(u'This field is required')])

         return cleaned_data