Django: How to access the display value of a ChoiceField in template given the actual value and the choices?

Question

I have a ChoiceField in a bound form, whose choices are:

[('all', 'All users'), ('group', 'Selected groups'), ('none', 'None')]

In the template, I have no problem accessing its bound value (the actual value to be stored; the first element of each tuple) and the choices. With these pieces of info in hands, I know I should be able to access the display values, or the second element of each tuple. But how can I do that in the template? Thanks.

Overcash

Here is a laugh, I even tried looping through the choices and accessing the elements within using square brackets in the template. Of course, that didn't work. Stupid me! – Overcash

If you have something like foo = ['a', {'b': 'c'}] the way you would access that in a template is foo.1.b i.e. you can access something using square brackets with the dot notation that Django templates have. You cannot however use a variable to specify the index without some kind of custom filter like {% with foo|index:my_variable as this_choice %}this_choice.b{% endwith %} which instead becomes incredibly messy so you are better of with a more specialised filter or to prepare your data in the view. Since this question is quite old, I'm sure you are well aware of that by now. – Pandich

Answer 1

I doubt that it can be done without custom template tag or filter. Custom template filter could look:

@register.filter
def selected_choice(form, field_name):
    return dict(form.fields[field_name].choices)[form.data[field_name]]

Norri

I'll leave this problem open for another day for digging up other solutions, if any. – Overcash

Thanks. After hours of research for a solution to the question, I think custom template tag is my best bet. – Overcash

I used: return form.fields[field_name].queryset.get(pk=form[field_name].value()) The form variable was called while iterating over a formset initialized with queryset=, and its self.data was returning {}. This solution, from the Django IRC logs, solved the problem. – Directed

To avoid many database hits, I used: return dict(form.fields[field_name].choices).get(form.initial.get(field_name, None), None) – Sonya

Answer 2

Use the get_FOO_display property.

** Edit **

Oups! Quick editing this answer, after reading the comments below.

bound_form['field'].value()

Should work according to this changeset

Wolcott

This is a Model field property but ChoiceField is a Form field, so this is not a viable solution. – Overcash

Indeed, someone posted the same answer earlier and he removed it. – Overcash

Answer 3

Check this link - https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/instances/#django.db.models.Model.get_FOO_display

You can use this function which will return the display name - ObjectName.get_FieldName_display()

Replace ObjectName with your class name and FieldName with the field of which you need to fetch the display name of.

Wisecrack

Your answer applies to Model fields but the question is regarding Form field, so this is not a solution. – Overcash

Not to mention, the same answer was already provided by Thibault J a while back then and I responded with the same. – Overcash

Answer 4

I have a contact form using the FormView class-based view. The contact form has some ChoiceField fields. I'm not storing the submissions in the database; just emailing them to the site owner. This is what I ended up doing:

def form_valid(self, form):
    for field in form.fields:
        if hasattr(form[field].field, 'choices'):
            form.cleaned_data[field + '_value'] = dict(form[field].field.choices)[form.cleaned_data[field]]

    ...

Industrials

Answer 5

If you use {{ form.instance.field }} in the form template, it should display the selected choice display name

Titos

Answer 6

After not being able to use get_FOO_display due to using the 'union' method (As it returns a dictionary, not a list of objects). I wrote a quick template tag to convert the field display.

@register.simple_tag
def tag_get_display(obj):
    """
        Returns the display of the field when unable to access get_foo_display.

    """
    return CHOICES_LIST[obj][1]

Fungi