Question

I need some help to have a widget work correctly in a web2py app.
By the way, once corrected, I think it could be useful to other users…

I built a SELECT widget to expose regions and their sub-regions (‘departement’) so that the user may have the choice.
For instance: a region A is divided into departement 11 and departement 12 and so on.
The user can choose either a region or a specific departement (sub-region).

The widget works correctly except that when submitted, the form returns errors:
form.errors: “r_name: no data”.
Below is a working example to show the problem.

Could anybody help me having this widget work correctly without returning errors, please. Since I don’t understand what’s wrong…
I would greatly appreciate your kind help.
Thanks a lot in advance.
Sorry for the formatting, but it’s the first time I post here … 😉

Dominique

in the model:

     db.define_table('region',
Field('r_name', 'string', length=250, required=True)
)  
db.define_table('departement',
Field('d_name', 'string', length=250, required=True),
Field('d_code', 'string', length=3, required=True),
Field('d_region', db.region)
)
db.define_table('region',
Field('r_name', 'string', length=250, required=True)
)  
db.define_table('departement',
Field('d_name', 'string', length=250, required=True),
Field('d_code', 'string', length=3, required=True),
Field('d_region', db.region)
)

def region_widget(f,v,_class= "options"):
"""
Widget  that shows regions and departements in a SELECT.
Can be used with SQLFORM and SQLFORM.factory
Usage:
db.region.r_name.widget = region_dptt_select_widget
"""
region_dptt = db(db.region.id==db.departement.d_region)\
                .select(db.region.r_name, db.region.id, db.departement.d_name, db.departement.d_code, db.departement.id, \
                orderby=db.region.r_name, cache=(cache.ram,6))

   def prepare_select(rows):
    """
    Creates a list of tuples to be used in the SELECT helper:
    ['Region A', OPTGROUP('SubRegion 1','SubRegion 2', 'SubRegion 3'),
    'Region B', OPTGROUP('SubRegion 4','SubRegion 5', 'SubRegion 6')]
    """
    l_r=[]
    for row in rows:
        r = row.region.r_name
        if row.region.r_name not in l_r:
            l_r.append(row.region.r_name)
    interm_list=[]
    for reg in l_r:
       l_sr=[]
       for row in rows:
            if reg == row.region.r_name:
                reg_id = row.region.id
                dep = row.departement.d_code + ' ' + row.departement.d_name
                dep_id = row.departement.id
                l_sr.append(OPTION(dep,_value=row.departement.d_code)) 
       option_reg = OPTION(reg, _value= 'R'+str(reg_id))
       interm_list.append((option_reg,l_sr))
    res=[]
    for reg, l_sr in interm_list:
        res.append(reg)
        res.append(OPTGROUP(*l_sr))
    return res
return SELECT(*prepare_select(region_dptt),
              **dict(_name='region_to_search', _value=v, _id='region_to_search', _type = 'string', _class="options"))

in the controller:

  def test():
db.region.r_name.widget = region_widget
fields=['r_name']
labels = {'r_name':T('')}
form= SQLFORM(db.region, fields = fields, labels = labels)
a=None
if form.accepts(request.vars, session, formname='test_form', dbio=False):
    a = form.vars
elif form.errors:
    a = form.errors
return dict(form=form, a = a)

def insertions():# TO RUN one time to fill regions and departments in the db
db.region.insert(r_name="Region A")
db.region.insert(r_name="Region B")
db.departement.insert(d_name="SubRegion 1", d_code="11", d_region=1)
db.departement.insert(d_name="SubRegion 2", d_code="12",  d_region=1)
db.departement.insert(d_name="SubRegion 3", d_code="21",  d_region=2)
db.departement.insert(d_name="SubRegion 4", d_code="22",  d_region=2)
db.departement.insert(d_name="SubRegion 5", d_code="25",  d_region=2)
db.departement.insert(d_name="SubRegion 6", d_code="26",  d_region=2) 

Answer 1

Your widget sets _name='region_to_search', but SQLFORM expects the form input field name (and therefore the associated variable in request.vars) to be the same as the name of the field in the db table used to generate the form (which is ‘r_name’). So, try changing your widget code to _name='r_name'.