Dynamic Initial Values in Django Forms
28 Jan 2009
I recently had cause to create a form with two date time fields which had the default values of midnight seven days ago, and midnight this morning. Initially I thought this would be easy and created the following form.
from datetime import datetime, date, timedelta
class MyForm(forms.Form):
date_from = forms.DateTimeField(label="From",
initial=(date.today() - timedelta(days=7)))
date_to = forms.DateTimeField(label="To", initial=date.today())
This works fine except that when a process has been running across more than one day the initial values are no longer correct as they refer to the day the process started. Fortunately it appears that there is an undocumented feature where the initial value can be a function rather than an absolute value. This function is called each time the unbound form is displayed, so they are always correct.
Wrapping the code to create the value in a lambda works great here, as does passing a reference to a
function.
from datetime import datetime, date, timedelta
class MyForm(forms.Form):
date_from = forms.DateTimeField(label="From",
initial=lambda: (date.today() - timedelta(days=7)))
date_to = forms.DateTimeField(label="To", initial=date.today)
Comments
Why not just:
f = MyForm(initial={'date_from': (date.today() - timedelta(days=7))}
Tomasz
22 Jul 2009
That would work, but to me it seems cleaner to have the defaults specified in the form rather than where you use it. What if you use the form in more than one place?
Andrew Wilkinson
06 Aug 2009
wolla initial it is easy on ear thanks :D
overcomes
23 Nov 2009