Question

I have a standard Model and ModelForm set-up. I want to be able to return the ModelForm object from my Model. This involves an impossible circular reference. I thought that since Django allows foreign key models to be expressed as strings, perhaps it’s possible to do something similar. At the moment I’m doing this:

class Thing(models.Model):
    stuff = models.TextField()

    def get_form(self):
        return getattr(sys.modules[__name__], "ThingForm")(self)


class ThingForm(ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = Thing

It works. But I feel that in doing this I bring shame upon myself and my family. There must be a more honourable way.

By the way, I want do to this because I’m using ContentTypes to create generic foreign keys, so my view code doesn’t know what class the model is in the static context.

Answer 1

That’s… not an impossible circular reference. Names are only looked up when the code that references them is run.

class Thing(models.Model):
    stuff = models.TextField()

    def get_form(self):
        return ThingForm(self)


class ThingForm(ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = Thing