Question

I’m working on my first Django application. In short, what it needs to do is to display a list of film titles, and allow users to give a rating (out of 10) to each film. I’ve been able to use the {{ form }} and {{ formset }} syntax in a template to produce a form which lets you rate one film at a time, which corresponds to one row in a MySQL table, but how do I produce a form that iterates over all the movie titles in the database and produces a form that lets you rate lots of them at once?

At first, I thought this was what formsets were for, but I can’t see any way to automatically iterate over the contents of a database table to produce items to go in the form, if you see what I mean.

Currently, my views.py has this code:

def survey(request):         ScoreFormSet = formset_factory(ScoreForm)         if request.method == 'POST':                 formset = ScoreFormSet(request.POST, request.FILES)                 if formset.is_valid():                         return HttpResponseRedirect('/')         else:                 formset = ScoreFormSet()         return render_to_response('cf/survey.html', {                 'formset':formset,         }) 

And my survey.html has this:

<form action='/survey/' method='POST'> <table> {{ formset }} </table>   <input type = 'submit' value = 'Submit'> </form> 

Oh, and the definition of ScoreForm and Score from models.py are:

class Score(models.Model):         movie = models.ForeignKey(Movie)         score = models.IntegerField()         user = models.ForeignKey(User)  class ScoreForm(ModelForm):         class Meta:                 model = Score 

So, in case the above is not clear, what I’m aiming to produce is a form which has one row per movie, and each row shows a title, and has a box to allow the user to enter their score.

If anyone can point me at the right sort of approach to this, I’d be most grateful.

Answer 1

‘At first, I thought this was what formsets were for, but I can’t see any way to automatically iterate over the contents of a database table to produce items to go in the form, if you see what I mean.’

You need to get a queryset. And you need to provide that queryset to your form as initial data. See using initial data with a formset for the code.

initial = [ list of { dictionaries }, one per form ]  

Interestingly, this is a direct feature of the model API through the values method of a queryset.