Django formset - show extra fields only when no initial data set?

Question

I have a page that displays multiple Formsets, each of which has a prefix. The formsets are created using formset_factory the default options, including extra=1. Rows can be added or deleted with JavaScript.

If the user is adding new data, one blank row shows up. Perfect.

If the user has added data but form validation failed, in which case the formset is populated with POST data using MyFormset(data, prefix='o1-formsetname') etc., only the data that they have entered shows up. Again, perfect. (the o1 etc. are dynamically generated, each o corresponds to an "option", and each "option" may have multiple formsets).

However if the user is editing existing data, in which case the view populates the formset using MyFormset(initial=somedata, prefix='o1-formsetname') where somedata is a list of dicts of data that came from a model in the database, an extra blank row is inserted after this data. I don't want a blank row to appear unless the user explicitly adds one using the JavaScript.

Is there any simple way to prevent the formset from showing an extra row if the initial data is set? The reason I'm using initial in the third example is that if I just passed the data in using MyFormset(somedata, prefix='o1-formsetname') I'd have to do an extra step of reformatting all the data into a POSTdata style dict including prefixes for each field, for example o1-formsetname-1-price: x etc., as well as calculating the management form data, which adds a whole load of complication.

One solution could be to intercept the formset before it's sent to the template and manually remove the row, but the extra_forms attribute doesn't seem to be writeable and setting extra to 0 doesn't make any difference. I could also have the JavaScript detect this case and remove the row. However I can't help but think I'm missing something obvious since the behaviour I want is what would seem to be sensible expected behaviour to me.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Use the max_num keyword argument to formset_factory:

MyFormset = formset_factory([...], extra=1, max_num=1)

For more details, check out limiting the maximum number of forms.

One hitch: presumably you want to be able to process more than one blank form. This isn't too hard; just make sure that you don't use the max_num keyword argument in the POST processing side.

Answer 2

I've come up with a solution that works with Django 1.1. I created a subclass of BaseFormSet that overrides the total_form_count method such that, if initial forms exist, the total does not include extra forms. Bit of a hack perhaps, and maybe there's a better solution that I couldn't find, but it works.

class SensibleFormset(BaseFormSet):
    def total_form_count(self):
        """Returns the total number of forms in this FormSet."""
        if self.data or self.files:
            return self.management_form.cleaned_data[TOTAL_FORM_COUNT]
        else:
            if self.initial_form_count() > 0:
                total_forms = self.initial_form_count()
            else:
                total_forms = self.initial_form_count() + self.extra
            if total_forms > self.max_num > 0:
                total_forms = self.max_num
            return total_forms