django - many to many field as dropdown on form

Question

I have a many to many relationship model which actually shows as a multi select list on forms. In one particular place I want to show it as dropdown single selection - any idea how to do this?

Answer 1

See the documentation on overriding default field types or widgets.

If you've got a Book model, with a ManyToMany relationship to Author, like this:

class Author(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    title = models.CharField(max_length=3, choices=TITLE_CHOICES)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.name

class Book(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    authors = models.ManyToManyField(Author)

then you can do something like this:

from django.forms import ModelForm, Select

class AuthorForm(ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = Author
        widgets = {
            'name': Select(),
        }

NB. This code is not tested, but will hopefully be enough to get you on your way.