Question

I wanted some guidance if possible on how to make this more generic:

def get_industry_choices(self):
    industries = Industry.objects.all().order_by('name')
    ind_arr = [(ind.id, ind.name) for ind in industries]

    return ind_arr

Basically this function will return choices as expected for the forms.ChoiceField. I need to do this in a few places, and wanted to make the function above more generic. I know how to get the industries = Industry.objects.all().order_by('name') to be generic, but the 2nd part is what I’m not sure about. When creating the tuples, it has (ind.id, ind.name). the ind.name can be any value depending on the model passed in (it may not always have name in the model).

I tried to read up on this in a few places including:

Passing functions with arguments to another function in Python?

The above resource shows how to do it using a function passed in, but that seems a bit overkill? If I have to pass a function as an argument anyway, whats the point of making it more generic with one more function?

[EDIT]

Basically I want to produce something similar to this:

TITLE_CHOICES=(
    (1, 'Mr.'),
    (2, 'Ms.'),
    (3, 'Mrs.'),
    (4, 'Dr.'),
    (5, 'Prof.'),
    (6, 'Rev.'),
    (7, 'Other'),
)

So when doing forms.ChoiceField I can pass in TITLE_CHOICES for example as the possible choices. The first value is the value I get when the form is submitted, the second value is what the user sees on form. I want to be able to programmatically create this with any model, I pass in the model name and one field in the above example, name. I want to create the tuple such that it is (id, name). But name could be replaced with anything in a different model…

Answer 1

It is hard to tell from your question, but I think the bit you are missing is getattr(). For example

ind = something()
for field in ['id', 'name']:
    print getattr(ind, field)