Question

I’d like to set custom name to a FileField object in my admin form so that it’s html name attribute will not be equal to my instance field name.

class MyAdminForm(forms.ModelForm):
    file_field = forms.FileField()

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):                                    
        if kwargs.has_key('instance'):
            instance = kwargs['instance']
            self.initial['image_file'] = instance.file_field

With this code I get <input type=”file” name=”file_field” /> and what I want to do is set it’s name attribute to something else.

EDIT:

I accepted the answer below, but I have another question. Is it possible to construct variable number of FileField objects? I mean – what if I’d like to have 4 of those now, but under some circumstances only one? Will I have to declare all of those as a class fields, like file_field1, file_field2 and so on, or is it possible to add them to a dictionary, like that: { ‘file_field1: FileField(), ‘file_field2’ : FileField() } – I actually tried it and got an error…

Answer 1

The name attribute in the HTML is the same as the name in the form definition so if you don’t want it to be file_field then don’t call it file_field.

class MyAdminForm(forms.ModelForm):
    new_field = forms.FileField()
    # Rest of the form goes here