Django and fieldsets on ModelForm

Question

I know you can specify fieldsets in django for Admin helpers. However, I cannot find anything useful for ModelForms. Just some patches which I cannot use. Am I missing something? Is there a way I could achieve something like fieldsets without manually writing out each field on my template in the appropriate tag.

I would ideally like to iterate through a set of BoundFields. However, doing something like this at the end of my ModelForm:

    fieldsets = []
    fieldsets.append(('Personal Information',
                      [username,password,password2,first_name,last_name,email]),) # add a 2 element tuple of string and list of fields
    fieldsets.append(('Terms & Conditions',
                      [acceptterms,acceptprivacy]),) # add a 2 element tuple of string and list of fields

fails as the items contained in my data structure are the raw fields, not the BoundFields. t looks like BoundFields are generated on the fly... this makes me sad. Could I create my own subclass of forms.Form which contains a concept of fieldsets (even a rough one that is not backward compatible... this is just for my own project) and if so, can you give any pointer? I do not want to mess with the django code.

Answer 1

Fieldsets in modelforms are still in "design" stage. There's a ticket in Django trac with low activity.

It's something I've been interested in researching myself in the near future, but since I haven't done it yet the best I can offer are these snippets:

• Form splitting/Fieldset templatetag
• Sectioned Form
• Forms splitted in fieldsets

Edit: I just noticed this question again and I realize it needs an edit to point out Carl's project django-form-utils which contains a BetterForm class which can contain fieldsets. If you like this project give him a +1 for his answer below :)

Answer 2

One thing you can do is break your logical fieldsets into separate model form classes.

class PersonalInfoForm (forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model=MyModel
        fields=('field1', 'field2', ...)

class TermsForm (forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model=MyModel
        fields=('fieldX', 'fieldY', ...)

Pass them to your template in different variables and break up the formsets:

<form ...>
   <fieldset><legend>Personal Information</legend>
       {{ personal_info_form }}
   </fieldset>
   <fieldset><legend>Terms and Conditions</legend>
       {{ terms_form }}
   </fieldset>
</form>

In that sense each of your form classes is just a fragment of the actual HTML form.

It introduces a touch of complexity when you call save on the form. You'll probably want to pass commit=False and then merge the resultant objects. Or just avoid using ModelForm.save altogether and populate your model object by hand with 'cleaned_data'

Answer 3

I think this snippet does exactly what you want. It gives you a Form subclass that allows you to declaratively subdivide your form into fieldsets and iterate through them in your template.

Answer 4

Daniel Greenfelds django-uni-form solves this with a the Layout helper class. I'm trying it out right now and it looks pretty clean to me.

Uniform helpers can use layout objects. A layout can consist of fieldsets, rows, columns, HTML and fields.

I originally picked Django-uni-form because it complies with section 508.