Question

I’d like to do something like this in Django:

class MyForm(forms.Form):
     items = Items.objects.all()
     for item in items:
         # How does this part work?
         exec(item.name) = forms.BooleanField()

The goal is to create one form field for each item returned from the database query. So, if I get ten items back from the query, then the class would have ten variables in it, each named after a returned item.

This seems theoretically possible, but is there some danger here? The items in the database are not user generated.

Answer 1

You can dynamically modify a form however you please:

class MyForm(forms.Form):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
         super(MyForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
         for item in Item.objects.all():
              self.fields[item.name] = forms.BooleanField()

I suppose the danger is if the database state changes while a user is submitting a form, and the new form initializes with new fields which the previous form didn’t have.