Say I have an address
table and it has a postal_code
field -- ModelChoiceField does not allow me to use something other than PKs to validate existence correct? What would be the way to go? Normal input and use clean_*()
?
ModelChoiceFields are meant to be used to select between a choice of existing model instances. This is almost always best represented by some form of Select field.
That said do you really have a FK from address to postal_code as you're implying. What are you storing on a PostalCode table to justify the extra table that will need to be joined in for every address related query?
For most cases postal_code should simply be a CharField and in that case if you want to validate that the value is valid you can use the choices
attribute with a list of valid postal codes. Keep in mind that maintaining a list of valid postal codes by hand is a huge hassle.
If you really have a PostalCode table and think it's a good idea (which in some cases it could be) you may want to consider actually using the postal_code as the primary key rather than the default autoincrement since it's necessarily unique, makes your data more exportable, and solves your issue with validation.
What about to_field_name
? I'm not sure if it's documented anywhere, but you can find it easily between ModelChoiceField
constructor params: https://github.com/django/django/blob/master/django/forms/models.py. It is used to filter field queryset.
For example:
articles = ModelChoiceField(queryset=Articles.objects.all(),
to_field_name='slug')
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