Question

I’m really new to django and I’m building a form and I need a select box for the user to select their country. I’m playing with the ChoiceField and I created a separate py file with a list of countries. my layout is something like this:

form file:

from django import COUNTRIES #I have a py file with the list of countries

country = forms.ChoiceField(COUNTRIES, label=u’Country’)

I kinda didn’t expect it to work – I got an error saying that it cannot import name countries . I don’t know what step to take to achieve my goal. Any helpful tips?

Answer 1

you can import modules the same way you would in a non django python module.

The module you made with the list of countries is not a django module, so you don’t import it from django.

If you had a file, my_choices.py which looked like this:

extras.py

COUNTRY_CHOICES = ( ('USA', 'USA'),
                    ('JPN', 'JAPAN'),
                    ('CAN', 'CANADA') )

and it is located in your project’s root dir:

myproject/
|_ __init__.py
|_ my_choices.py
|_ settings.py
...

if your project is in the PYTHONPATH, you can import the choices by typing:

>>> from my_choices import COUNTRY_CHOICES
>>> print COUNTRY_CHOICES
(('USA', 'USA'), ('JPN', 'JAPAN'), ('CAN', 'CANADA'))
>>> 

i usually put stuff like this in a utils folder:

myproject/
|_ __init__.py
|_ utils/
   |_ __init__.py
   |_ my_choices.py

so:

>>> from utils.my_choices import COUNTRY_CHOICES
>>> COUNTRY_CHOICES
(('USA', 'USA'), ('JPN', 'JAPAN'), ('CAN', 'CANADA'))
>>> 

in your forms.py

from utils.my_choices import COUNTRY_CHOICES

class SomeForm(forms.Form):
    country = forms.ChoiceField(choices=COUNTRY_CHOICES, label=u'Country')