Question

I’ve following scenario:

• The user loads home.html, selects a subset of the five checkboxes and clicks on submit.
• The user lands on stats.html, which will show values related to the selected checkboxes AND marks the specific checkboxes as CHECKED.

I’m passing a variable called ‘itemsToCheck’ with following content to the stats.html template:

[(u'8', u'on'), (u'7', u'on')]

Where those values should help me to select specific checkboxes like this:

<input type="checkbox" checked="yes" name="{{ MyModel.id }}"/>

How would you accomplish that (using a template syntax like checked={% something %} or maybe jQuery)?

I’m a Django/web development beginner, so please let me know if my approach is completely wrong and if there is a cleaner/more elegant solution.

Answer 1

This will work if you pass the a dict instead of a list:

itemsToCheck = {7: 'on', 8: 'on'}

<input type="checkbox" {% if MyModel.id in itemsToCheck.keys %}checked="checked"{% endif %} name="{{ MyModel.id }}"/>

For the described list:

[(8, 'on'), (9, 'on')]

you’ll have to do some more processing.

EDIT:
Or in case when dict keys are strings:

{% if MyModel.id|stringformat:"s" in itemsToCheck.keys %}

Or just prepare the itemsToCheck in a format to skip the conversion…

EDIT 2:
Actually, I’d use a tag here:

@register.inclusion_tag('checkbox.html')
def my_checkboxes(request, items):
    return {"items": [{'id': i.id, 'checked': request.POST[str(i.id)] == 'on'} for i in items]}

and then in checkbox.html:

{% for i in items %}
<input type="checkbox" {% if i.checked %}checked="checked"{% endif %} name="{{ i.id }}"/>
{% endfor %}