Introduction

To define a form in django, a developer has to create a class which extends django.forms.Form and has a number of attributes extending from django.forms.Field. This makes it very easy for the developer to create static forms, but creating dynamic forms whose fields can be changed depending on the data contributed by the users of the application is not so obvious.

Of course, some people may argue that they can do whatever they want just by spitting html input tags to their templates, however this totally violates DRY and any serious django developer would prefer to write MUMPS than creating html dynamically.

The implementation I will present here had been developed for an old project: In that project there was a number of services which could be edited dynamically by the moderators. For each service, the moderators would generate a questionnaire to get input from the users which would be defined using JSON. When the users needed to submit information for each service, a dynamic django form would be generated from this JSON and the answers would be saved to no-SQL database like MongoDB.

Describing a django form in JSON

A JSON described django form is just an array of field JSON objects. Each field object has three required attributes: name which is the keyword of the field, label which is how the label of the field and type which is the type of the input of that field. The supported types are text, textarea, integer, radio, select, checkbox. Now, depending on the type of the field, there could be also some more required attributes, for instace text has a max_length attribute and select has a choices attribute (which is an array of name/value objects). Also there are two optional attributes, required with a default value of False and help_text with a default value of ”.

As you can understand these map one by one to the corresponding attributes of the actual django form fields. An example containing a complete JSON described form is the following:

[
    {
        "name": "firstname",
        "label": "First Name",
        "type": "text",
        "max_length": 25,
        "required": 1
    },
    {
        "name": "lastname",
        "label": "Last Name",
        "type": "text",
        "max_length": 25,
        "required": 1
    },
    {
        "name": "smallcv",
        "label": "Small CV",
        "type": "textarea",
        "help_text": "Please insert a small CV"
    },
    {
        "name": "age",
        "label": "Age",
        "type": "integer",
        "max_value": 200,
        "min_value": 0
    },
    {
        "name": "marital_status",
        "label": "Marital Status",
        "type": "radio",
        "choices": [
            {"name": "Single", "value":"single"},
            {"name": "Married", "value":"married"},
            {"name": "Divorced", "value":"divorced"},
            {"name": "Widower", "value":"widower"}
        ]
    },
    {
        "name": "occupation",
        "label": "Occupation",
        "type": "select",
        "choices": [
            {"name": "Farmer", "value":"farmer"},
            {"name": "Engineer", "value":"engineer"},
            {"name": "Teacher", "value":"teacher"},
            {"name": "Office Clerk", "value":"office_clerk"},
            {"name": "Merchant", "value":"merchant"},
            {"name": "Unemployed", "value":"unemployed"},
            {"name": "Retired", "value":"retired"},
            {"name": "Other", "value":"other"}
        ]
    },
    {
        "name": "internet",
        "label": "Internet Access",
        "type": "checkbox"
    }
]

The above JSON string can be easily converted to an array of dictionaries with the following code:

import json
fields=json.loads(json_fields)

Creating the form fields

The most import part in the django dynamic form creation is to convert the above array of field-describing dictionaries to actual objects of type django.forms.Field.

To help with that I implemented a class named FieldHandler which gets an array of field dictionaries and after initialization will have an attribute named formfields which will be a dictionary with keys the names of each field an values the corresponding django.forms.Field objects. The implementation is as follows:

import django.forms

class FieldHandler():
    formfields = {}
    def __init__(self, fields):
        for field in fields:
            options = self.get_options(field)
            f = getattr(self, "create_field_for_"+field['type'] )(field, options)
            self.formfields[field['name']] = f

    def get_options(self, field):
        options = {}
        options['label'] = field['label']
        options['help_text'] = field.get("help_text", None)
        options['required'] = bool(field.get("required", 0) )
        return options

    def create_field_for_text(self, field, options):
        options['max_length'] = int(field.get("max_length", "20") )
        return django.forms.CharField(**options)

    def create_field_for_textarea(self, field, options):
        options['max_length'] = int(field.get("max_value", "9999") )
        return django.forms.CharField(widget=django.forms.Textarea, **options)

    def create_field_for_integer(self, field, options):
        options['max_value'] = int(field.get("max_value", "999999999") )
        options['min_value'] = int(field.get("min_value", "-999999999") )
        return django.forms.IntegerField(**options)

    def create_field_for_radio(self, field, options):
        options['choices'] = [ (c['value'], c['name'] ) for c in field['choices'] ]
        return django.forms.ChoiceField(widget=django.forms.RadioSelect,   **options)

    def create_field_for_select(self, field, options):
        options['choices']  = [ (c['value'], c['name'] ) for c in field['choices'] ]
        return django.forms.ChoiceField(  **options)

    def create_field_for_checkbox(self, field, options):
        return django.forms.BooleanField(widget=django.forms.CheckboxInput, **options)

As can be seen, in the __init__ method, the get_options method is called first which returns a dictionary with the common options (label, help_text, required). After that, depending on the type of each field the correct method will be generated with getattr(self, "create_field_for_"+field['type'] ) (so if type is text this will return a reference to the create_field_for_text method) and then called passing the field dictinary and the options returned from get_options. Each one of the create_field_for_xxx methods will extract the required (or optional) attributes for the specific field type, update options and initialize the correct Field passing the options as kwargs. Finally the formfields attribute will be updated with the name and Field object.

Creating the actual form

To create the actual dynamic django.forms.Form I used the function get_form which receives a string with the json description, parses it to a python array, creates the array of fields with the help of FieldHandler and then generates the Form class with type passing it django.forms.Form as a parent and the array of django.forms.Field from FieldHandler as attributes:

def get_form(jstr):
    fields=json.loads(jstr)
    fh = FieldHandler(fields)
    return type('DynaForm', (django.forms.Form,), fh.formfields )

Using the dynamic form

The result of get_form can be used as a normal form class. As an example:

import dynaform

def dform(request):
    json_form = get_json_form_from_somewhere()
    form_class = dynaform.get_form(json_form)
    data = {}
    if request.method == 'POST':
        form = form_class(request.POST)
        if form.is_valid():
            data = form.cleaned_data
    else:
        form = form_class()

    return render_to_response( "dform.html", {
        'form': form,  'data': data,
    }, RequestContext(request) )

So, we have to get our JSON form description from somewhere (for instance a field in a model) and then generate the form class with get_form. After that we follow the normal procedure of checking if the request.method is POST so we pass the POST data to the form and check if it is value or we just create an empty form. As a result we just pass the data that was read from the form to the view for presentation.