Question

I’m trying to populate a django modelform with initial data provided from an external source. To achieve that I start by pull all the needed data from the external source:

url =('http://myapi.example.com')
data = urllib2.urlopen(url)
result = json.load(data)

api_data_name = result['properties']['name']
api_data_type = result['properties']['type']

Followed by populating a dict which will serve as initial data to my form:

data = {}
for field in my_model._meta.fields:
    if field.name == 'name':
        data[field.name] = api_data_name
form = MyEditForm(initial=data)

Then I’m passing the form to the template and the initial data is populating my text fields as expected, but now I need to be able to set a value of a select field based on a string I receive from my external source and Im not getting how can I achieve that, since doing something like:

if field.name == 'type':
    data[field.name] = api_data_type

Wont do the job cause the select element has “0”, “1”, “2”, etc as options value and not the long description i get from api_data_type variable.

How can I get the long_description from all the options <option value="1">long_description</option> of my select field in my view so i can compare each one with api_data_type?

Heres a sample of my models.py and forms.py:

#models.py

TYPE = (
    ('0',_(u'Type1')),
    ('1',_(u'Type2')),
    ('2',_(u'Type3')),
)

class MyModel(models.Model):
    ...
    type=models.CharField(max_length=30,choices=TYPE,blank=True)
    ...

#forms.py
class MyEditForm(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = MyModel

        widgets = {
            ...
            'type': Select(attrs={'class':'select-small span2'}),
            ...
        }

Answer 1

Found out how to accomplish what I asked.

# For select fields
if field.name == 'classification':
    for choice in field.choices:
        if choice[1].lower() == api_poi_classification.lower():
            data[field.name] = choice[0]

And for any of ya trying to populate many-to-many fields (as checkboxes in my case)

# Many to many fields populate          
for field in hotel_poi._meta.many_to_many:
    if field.name == 'views':
        if u'Vista' in api_poi_review_fields:
            api_vistas = api_poi_review[u'Vista']
            # The api_vistas string comes from api in the format (v1; v2; v3; v4)
            views = api_vistas.split(';')
            choices = field.get_choices()
            temp = []
            for view in views:
                for choice in choices:
                    if view.lower().strip() == choice[1].lower().strip():
                    temp.append(choice[0])          
            data[field.name]=temp

All of this could be avoided if I had direct database access… In that case i would just need to set an object instance like m = MyModel.objects.filter(id=1) and call form = MyEditForm(instance=m)

But that was not the case and that’s what makes this question a bit particular.