Question

I have written a factory function to create dynamic forms, as described towards the end of James Bennett’s helpful post http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/nov/09/dynamic-forms/.

The form works perfectly well, but the items are shown in a somewhat random looking order, due (I assume) to the fact that fields is a dictionary (please see code sample below). How can I prescribe a defined display order for the form fields?

def make_form(assessment):
    '''
    Factory function to build and return dynamic AssessmentForms
    '''
    entries = assessment.entry_set.all()

    fields = {}

    for entry in entries:
        fields[entry.name] = forms.ChoiceField(
            required=False,
            initial=entry.rating,
            choices=CHOICES,
            widget=forms.RadioSelect()
        )

    return type('AssessmentForm', (forms.BaseForm,), { 'base_fields': fields })

Answer 1

Use a SortedDict (djangos implementation of OrderedDict 2.7+)

https://github.com/django/django/blob/master/django/utils/datastructures.py