I was working on some code and realized that ManyToManyFields always show up last in a ModelForm, regardless if you specify the order in the Meta fields property. Apparently this is due to be fixed in Django 1.1 which is right around the corner.. unfortunately I’m on 1.0 and feel anxious about moving 10+ sites to 1.1 beta right at this moment. I also felt it was a bit inappropriate to diff my Django source.

Please be aware that this is a hack. It is not an optimal solution. Stuff like form.as_* will NOT work with the solution below. All this does is add a property called ordered_fields to your ModelForm which implements the correct behavior.

# models.py
class Bar(models.Model):
	pass

class Foo(models.Model):
        # ordinarily, Django 1.0 would list the regular_field first and all M2Ms last
	many_to_many = models.ManyToManyField('Bar', related_name='foos')
	regular_field = models.CharField(max_length=10)

# forms.py
class FooForm(forms.ModelForm):
	def ordered_fields(self):
		list = []
		for field_name in self._meta.fields:
			list.append(self[field_name])
		return list

	class Meta:
		model = Foo
		fields = ('many_to_many',
			     'regular_field',)

#Template:

<form action="{{ app_path }}" method="post" id="foo-form">
	<fieldset class="module aligned ()">
	{% for field in form.ordered_fields %}
		<div class="form-row thin wide ()">

			{{ field.label_tag }}
			{{ field }}
			{{ field.errors }}
			{% if field.help_text %}
			<p class="help">{{ field.help_text }}</p>
			{% endif %}
		</div>
	{% endfor %}
	</fieldset>
	<div class="submit-row aligned ()">
		<input class="default" type="submit" value="Send" />
	</div>
</form>

Tags: Django, ModelForm

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Django. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.