Question

I’m rather new to Django and I’m using Django 1.0.
I have this:
forms.py:

class MyForm(forms.Form):
    extra_cheeze = forms.BooleanField(required=False,
                                      initial=False,
                                      label='Extra cheeze')

views.py:

def order_something(request):
    form = MyForm(request.POST or None)
    if request.method == 'POST' and form.is_valid():
        # do stuff...

The problem is that the form is not valid unless the checkbox is checked, so there doesn’t seem to be a way to get a False value from the field.
As far as I can understand from the docs, it should work. It works if I add a CharField to my form…

Am I misunderstanding something here or is this a bug? (Yes, I have googled but found nothing relevant)

Update: As suggested by @Dominic Rodger, I tried adding a hidden field
dummy = forms.CharField(initial='dummy', widget=forms.widgets.HiddenInput())
and that makes the form valid. This workaround enables me to move on right now, but it would still be interesting to know if I’m misunderstanding something…

Answer 1

There was a bug in the code in my question. Thanks to @d0ugal for helping me spot it by including a slightly different example. The problem was here:

form = MyForm(request.POST or None) # <- PROBLEM HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
if request.method == 'POST' and form.is_valid():
    # do stuff...

The bug was that I assumed that request.POST would evaluate to True if it was a post. But since browsers don’t post anything for a not-checked checkbox, and that was the only field, the POST data was an empty dictionary, which evaluates to False. This caused None to be used as initialization data, causing the form to be unbound and not valid.
@d0ugal’s example does the safe thing and tests request.method first.