Question

I’m trying to make a CreateView have a readonly field with a set value, but I’m unable to make that work.

I have a model with a ForeignKey to another model:

class CompanyNote(TimeStampedModel):
    company = models.ForeignKey(Company)
    note = models.TextField(blank=True)

And I have a CreateView:

class CompanyNoteCreateView(CreateView):
    model = models.CompanyNote
    form_class = CompanyNoteForm

That uses a custom ModelForm:

class CompanyNoteForm(forms.ModelForm):

    company = forms.ChoiceField(
        widget=forms.widgets.Select(attrs={'readonly': 'readonly'}))

    class Meta:
        model = models.CompanyNote

As you see, the widget for the field in question is readonly. This is because I pick up the company as a part of the URL, as in company/1/note/add . I have no trouble picking up the “1” and finding the right company object, but I don’t know how to set the readonly field.

I tried:

def get_initial(self):
    initial = super(CompanyNoteCreateView, self).get_initial()
    initial['company'] = self.get_company().id
    return initial

But that didn’t work. The Widget is empty, which may be the problem. Perhaps I’m barking up the wrong tree here. Any ideas welcome.

Answer 1

Have you tried setting the attribute in the Form’s Meta class?

I experienced an issue where Form attributes were not applied for Model Fields if set in the base class definition, but they worked correctly in the Meta class:

class CompanyNoteForm(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = models.CompanyNote
        widgets = {'company': forms.widgets.Select(attrs={'readonly': True,
                                                          'disabled': True})}

Otherwise check this answer out.

Worst case scenario, make company a hidden field?