Django Passing Custom Form Parameters to Formset

Question

I would use functools.partial and functools.wraps:

from functools import partial, wraps
from django.forms.formsets import formset_factory

ServiceFormSet = formset_factory(wraps(ServiceForm)(partial(ServiceForm, affiliate=request.affiliate)), extra=3)

I think this is the cleanest approach, and doesn't affect ServiceForm in any way (i.e. by making it difficult to subclass).

Official Document Way

Django 2.0:

ArticleFormSet = formset_factory(MyArticleForm)
formset = ArticleFormSet(form_kwargs={'user': request.user})

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.0/topics/forms/formsets/#passing-custom-parameters-to-formset-forms

I would build the form class dynamically in a function, so that it has access to the affiliate via closure:

def make_service_form(affiliate):
    class ServiceForm(forms.Form):
        option = forms.ModelChoiceField(
                queryset=ServiceOption.objects.filter(affiliate=affiliate))
        rate = forms.DecimalField(widget=custom_widgets.SmallField())
        units = forms.IntegerField(min_value=1, 
                widget=custom_widgets.SmallField())
    return ServiceForm

As a bonus, you don't have to rewrite the queryset in the option field. The downside is that subclassing is a little funky. (Any subclass has to be made in a similar way.)

edit:

In response to a comment, you can call this function about any place you would use the class name:

def view(request):
    affiliate = get_object_or_404(id=request.GET.get('id'))
    formset_cls = formset_factory(make_service_form(affiliate))
    formset = formset_cls(request.POST)
    ...

This is what worked for me, Django 1.7:

from django.utils.functional import curry    

lols = {'lols':'lols'}
formset = modelformset_factory(MyModel, form=myForm, extra=0)
formset.form = staticmethod(curry(MyForm, lols=lols))
return formset

#form.py
class MyForm(forms.ModelForm):

    def __init__(self, lols, *args, **kwargs):

Hope it helps someone, took me long enough to figure it out ;)

I like the closure solution for being "cleaner" and more Pythonic (so +1 to mmarshall answer) but Django forms also have a callback mechanism you can use for filtering querysets in formsets.

It's also not documented, which I think is an indicator the Django devs might not like it as much.

So you basically create your formset the same but add the callback:

ServiceFormSet = forms.formsets.formset_factory(
    ServiceForm, extra=3, formfield_callback=Callback('option', affiliate).cb)

This is creating an instance of a class that looks like this:

class Callback(object):
    def __init__(self, field_name, aff):
        self._field_name = field_name
        self._aff = aff
    def cb(self, field, **kwargs):
        nf = field.formfield(**kwargs)
        if field.name == self._field_name:  # this is 'options' field
            nf.queryset = ServiceOption.objects.filter(affiliate=self._aff)
        return nf

This should give you the general idea. It's a little more complex making the callback an object method like this, but gives you a little more flexibility as opposed to doing a simple function callback.

I wanted to place this as a comment to Carl Meyers answer, but since that requires points I just placed it here. This took me 2 hours to figure out so I hope it will help someone.

A note about using the inlineformset_factory.

I used that solution my self and it worked perfect, until I tried it with the inlineformset_factory. I was running Django 1.0.2 and got some strange KeyError exception. I upgraded to latest trunk and it worked direct.

I can now use it similar to this:

BookFormSet = inlineformset_factory(Author, Book, form=BookForm)
BookFormSet.form = staticmethod(curry(BookForm, user=request.user))

As of commit e091c18f50266097f648efc7cac2503968e9d217 on Tue Aug 14 23:44:46 2012 +0200 the accepted solution can't work anymore.

The current version of django.forms.models.modelform_factory() function uses a "type construction technique", calling the type() function on the passed form to get the metaclass type, then using the result to construct a class-object of its type on the fly::

# Instatiate type(form) in order to use the same metaclass as form.
return type(form)(class_name, (form,), form_class_attrs)

This means even a curryed or partial object passed instead of a form "causes the duck to bite you" so to speak: it'll call a function with the construction parameters of a ModelFormClass object, returning the error message::

function() argument 1 must be code, not str

To work around this I wrote a generator function that uses a closure to return a subclass of any class specified as first parameter, that then calls super.__init__ after updateing the kwargs with the ones supplied on the generator function's call::

def class_gen_with_kwarg(cls, **additionalkwargs):
  """class generator for subclasses with additional 'stored' parameters (in a closure)
     This is required to use a formset_factory with a form that need additional 
     initialization parameters (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/622982/django-passing-custom-form-parameters-to-formset)
  """
  class ClassWithKwargs(cls):
      def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
          kwargs.update(additionalkwargs)
          super(ClassWithKwargs, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
  return ClassWithKwargs

Then in your code you'll call the form factory as::

MyFormSet = inlineformset_factory(ParentModel, Model,form = class_gen_with_kwarg(MyForm, user=self.request.user))

caveats:

• this received very little testing, at least for now
• supplied parameters could clash and overwrite those used by whatever code will use the object returned by the constructor