Django Dynamic Forms Save

Question

I am using James Bennetts code (link text) to create a dynamic form. Everything is working ok but I have now come to the point where I need to save the data and have become a bit stuck. I know I can assess the data returned by the form and simply save this to the database as a string but what I'd really like to do is save what type of data it is e.g. date, integer, varchar along with the value so that when it comes to viewing the data I can do some processing on it depending on what type it is e.g. get dates greater than last week.

So my question is how do I access what database type the form element is based on what type of form element it is e.g. a django.forms.IntegerField has a database field type of int, django.forms.DateField would be a date field and django.forms.ChoiceField would be a varchar field?

Answer 1

Why do you want to know, what kind of database field you are using? Are you storing information from the form through raw sql? You should have some model, that you are storing information from the form and it will do all the work for you.

Maybe you could show some form code? Right now it's hard to determine, what exactly you are trying to do.

Answer 2

I can not understand the exact problem, so forgive me if I get things wrong.

If you are using models, then you don't need to know about database-level data types. They are defined by django according to your model fields.

However, since you are talking about dynamic forms (I've read the article), you are probably not working with models, at least not directly. In that case, it should not matter as well, because you are using form validation so, for example, you can be absolutely sure that an integer comes out of a forms.IntegerField field, unicode comes out of forms.CharField and so on.

If you are writing your database-interaction routies by hand (raw sql), then you have to map python-types to db-types yourself, for example <type 'int'> goes to a column of type integer (or something), <type 'datetime.datetime'> goes to a datetime type of column (or not, this example is arbitrary) and so on. When you are using models, django does this type of mapping for you in a database-engine-independent way.

Either way, you, yourself are defining the datatypes on the python side and you or django must also define the datatypes on the db side. The choice of those types is, at times, not an automatic 1:1 type of decision, but, rather, a design decision, based on what this data is used for in your application.

Sorry, if this makes little sense, but, I must admit, that I don't quite understand the problem behind your question.

Answer 3

If you're using James' code, then you don't get a Model out of the form per se, rather a list of form field elements. That means that you can't save the data as a Model instance.

I think you have two choices; bundle the whole form into a JSON object and save that into a LONGTEXT variable in your database, or save each form element into a row of the database on its own, saving it into a BLOB entry. In this case, you'll need to 'pickle' the object before saving it. If you pickle the object and save it into the database, when you retrieve it and unpickle it, you'll have all the python class information associated with the object.

Trying to make this clearer - if you have the bytes; 2009-11-28 21:34:36.516176, is this a str or a datetime object? You can't tell if it's stored in the database as a VARCHAR or LONGTEXT. Which is the core of your question - you do get object information if you save it as a pickled object though.

By extension, you could save your whole Form object into the database, either as a JSON object, or pickle the object and save that.

I'm struggling with something very similar at the moment, as I'm trying to put together a dynamic form system, and thinking of going the 'individual form field element, pickled' and then saved into the database. So I'll be watching how this question works out! :)