For reasons unimportant to this message, I found it necessary to
rearrange the order that fields are rendered on some of my forms.
According to the django docs., I simply needed to rearrange the order
of fields as I defined them, which works quite fine when I know in
advance the required order. My use-case does not know in advance (very
long story)
In models.BaseForm, the display and rendering is managed with a
dictionary containing the fields.
The rendering method is called "_html_output" and it iterates as
follows
for name, field in self.fields.items():
Because models.BaseForm.fields is a dictionary and dictionaries are
not inherently sorted, whatever order that dictionary is in, is the
order the form renders. I've not followed up in the code as to how
django controls the dictionary order, I just decided to add a bit of
functionality to solve my requirements (nee problem) dynamically.
Initially I thought of overshadowing "_html_output" with my own, but
that can be tricky because there is a fair amm't going on in that
method. It is possible that django may change that method and that
could spell future trouble.
So here's an outline of roughly how I did it and I'm hoping to hear
comments as to why/where I may have problems with this:
First, I created a custom dictionary class that knows how to sort its
items (can do this with values too, just not showing it here):
class sorted_dict(dict):
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs ):
super(sorted_dict, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
def items( self ):
k = self.keys()
k.sort()
return [[i, self[i]] for i in k]
Then I was able to do something that looked like this:
class MyFormClass(forms.Form):
zebras = forms.CharField()
aardvarks = forms.CharField()
orangutans = forms.CharField()
my_form = MyFormClass( some_data )
my_form.as_p() returns the original order:
<p>zebras...</p>
<p>aardvarks...</p>
<p>orangutans...</p>
my_form.fields = sorted_dict(my_form.field)
my_form.as_p() returns this order:
<p>aardvarks...</p>
<p>orangutans...</p>
<p>zebras...</p>
Before I overshadowed the dictionary method with my custom behavior,
the form would render in class definition order, afterwards it renders
in alphabetical order by fields (in this example).
Can anyone think of a reason that this would break in the future or a
more django-esque way to accomplish this?
Scott
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