Customize/remove Django select box blank option

I'm using Django 1.0.2. I've written a ModelForm backed by a Model. This model has a ForeignKey where blank=False. When Django generates HTML for this form it creates a select box with one option for each row in the table referenced by the ForeignKey. It also creates an option at the top of the list that has no value and displays as a series of dashes:

<option value="">---------</option>


What I'd like to know is:

What is the cleanest way to customize it so that it shows as:

<option value="">Select Item</option>


In searching for a solution I came across Django ticket 4653 which gave me the impression that others had the same question and that the default behavior of Django may have been modified. This ticket is over a year old so I was hoping there might be a cleaner way to accomplish these things.

Thanks for any help,

Jeff

Edit: I've configured the ForeignKey field as such:

verb = models.ForeignKey(Verb, blank=False, default=get_default_verb)


This does set the default so that it's no longer the empty/dashes option but unfortunately it doesn't seem to resolve either of my questions. That is, the empty/dashes option still appears in the list.

15 Answers
15

Haven't tested this, but based on reading Django's code here and here I believe it should work:

class ThingForm(models.ModelForm):
class Meta:
model = Thing

def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
super(ThingForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
self.fields['verb'].empty_label = None


EDIT: This is documented, though you wouldn't necessarily know to look for ModelChoiceField if you're working with an auto-generated ModelForm.

EDIT: As jlpp notes in his answer, this isn't complete - you have to re-assign the choices to the widgets after changing the empty_label attribute. Since that's a bit hacky, the other option that might be easier to understand is just overriding the entire ModelChoiceField:

class ThingForm(models.ModelForm):
verb = ModelChoiceField(Verb.objects.all(), empty_label=None)

class Meta:
model = Thing


from the docs

The blank choice will not be included
if the model field has blank=False and
an explicit default value (the default
value will be initially selected
instead).

so set the default and you're ok

With Carl's answer as a guide and after rooting around the Django source for a couple hours I think this is the complete solution:

To remove the empty option (extending Carl's example):

class ThingForm(models.ModelForm):
class Meta:
model = Thing

def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
super(ThingForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
self.fields['verb'].empty_label = None
# following line needed to refresh widget copy of choice list
self.fields['verb'].widget.choices =
self.fields['verb'].choices


To customize the empty option label is essentially the same:

class ThingForm(models.ModelForm):
class Meta:
model = Thing

def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
super(ThingForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
self.fields['verb'].empty_label = "Select a Verb"
# following line needed to refresh widget copy of choice list
self.fields['verb'].widget.choices =
self.fields['verb'].choices


I think this approach applies to all scenarios where ModelChoiceFields are rendered as HTML but I'm not positive. I found that when these fields are initialized, their choices are passed to the Select widget (see django.forms.fields.ChoiceField._set_choices). Setting the empty_label after initialization does not refresh the Select widget's list of choices. I'm not familiar enough with Django to know if this should be considered a bug.

You can use this on your model:

class MyModel(models.Model):
name = CharField('fieldname', max_length=10, default=None)


default=None is the answer :D

NOTE: I tried this on Django 1.7

blank=False

default

As for the django 1.4 all you need is to set the "default" value and "blank=False" on the choices field

class MyModel(models.Model):
CHOICES = (
(0, 'A'),
(1, 'B'),
)
choice_field = models.IntegerField(choices=CHOICES, blank=False, default=0)


See here for the complete debate on and methods for resolution of this issue.

you can do this in admin:

formfield_overrides =
models.ForeignKey: 'empty_label': None,



self.fields['xxx'].empty_value = None would not work If you field type is TypedChoiceField which do not have empty_label property.

self.fields['xxx'].empty_value = None

TypedChoiceField

empty_label

What we should do is to remove first choice:

1 . If you want to build a BaseForm auto detect TypedChoiceField

BaseForm

TypedChoiceField

class BaseForm(forms.ModelForm):

def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
super(BaseForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)

for field_name in self.fields:
field = self.fields.get(field_name)
if field and isinstance(field , forms.TypedChoiceField):
field.choices = field.choices[1:]
# code to process other Field
# ....

class AddClientForm(BaseForm):
pass


2.only a few form, you can use:

class AddClientForm(forms.ModelForm):

def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
super(AddClientForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
self.fields['xxx'].choices = self.fields['xxx'].choices[1:]


self.fields['xxx'].choices = self.fields['xxx'].choices[1:]

self.fields['xxx'].choices = [('', 'Nothing')] + self.fields['xxx'].choices[1:]

BaseForm

I was messing around with this today and just came up with a coward hack nifty solution:

# Cowardly handle ModelChoiceField empty label
# we all hate that '-----' thing
class ModelChoiceField_init_hack(object):
@property
def empty_label(self):
return self._empty_label

@empty_label.setter
def empty_label(self, value):
self._empty_label = value
if value and value.startswith('-'):
self._empty_label = 'Select an option'
ModelChoiceField.__bases__ += (ModelChoiceField_init_hack,)


Now you can tweak the default ModelChoiceField empty label to anything you'd like. :-)

ModelChoiceField

PS: No need for downvotes, non-harmful monkey patches are always handy.

For the latest version of django
the first answer should be like this

class ThingForm(models.ModelForm):
class Meta:
model = Thing

def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
self.base_fields['cargo'].empty_label = None
super(ThingForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)`


For a ForeignKey field, setting the default value to '' on the model will remove the blank option.

ForeignKey

default

''

verb = models.ForeignKey(Verb, on_delete=models.CASCADE, default='')


For other fields like CharField you could set the default to None, but this does not work for ForeignKey fields in Django 1.11.

CharField

default

None

ForeignKey

I find SOLUTION!!

But not for ForeignKey :-)

Maybe I can help you.
I looked in Django source code and discovered that in django.forms.extras.widgets.SelecteDateWidget() is a property called none_value that equals (0, '-----') so I did in my code this

class StudentForm(ModelForm):
class Meta:
this_year = int(datetime.datetime.today().strftime('%Y'))
birth_years =
years =

for year in range(this_year - 2, this_year + 3 ):
years.append(year)
for year in range(this_year - 60, this_year+2):
birth_years.append(year)

model = Student
exclude = ['user', 'fullname']
date_widget = SelectDateWidget(years=years)

date_widget.__setattr__('none_value', (0, 'THERE WAS THAT "-----" NO THERES THIS:-)'))
widgets =
'beginning': date_widget,
'birth': SelectDateWidget(years=birth_years),



self.fields[field_name].widget.choices[0] = ('', SOME_FIRST_CHOICE_DISPLAY_VALUE)

There are lots of great answers here, but I'm still not entirely satisfied with the implementations. I'm also a bit frustrated that select widgets from different sources (foreign keys, choices) yield different behaviours.

I have a design I'm working with where select fields always have a blank option, and if they're required they will have a star next to them and the form will simply not validate if they're left empty. That said, I can only properly override the empty_label for fields that are not TypedChoiceFields.

TypedChoiceField

Here's what the result should look like. The first result is always the name of the field - in my case, the label.

label

Here's what I ended up doing. The following is an overridden __init__ method of my form:

__init__

def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
for _, field in self.fields.items():
if hasattr(field, 'empty_label'):
field.empty_label = field.label
if isinstance(field, forms.TypedChoiceField):
field.choices = [('', field.label)] + [choice for choice in field.choices if choice[0]]


Since Django 1.7, you can customize the label for the blank value by adding a value to your choices list in your model field definition. From the documentation on configuring field choices:

Unless blank=False is set on the field along with a default then a label containing "---------" will be rendered with the select box. To override this behavior, add a tuple to choices containing None; e.g. (None, 'Your String For Display'). Alternatively, you can use an empty string instead of None where this makes sense - such as on a CharField.

I checked the documentation for different versions of Django and found that this was added in Django 1.7.

This becomes more complicated when the choices are foreign keys and if you want to filter the choices based on some criteria. In such case if you set the empty_label and then re-assign the choices (you can apply filtration here too) the empty label will be blank:

empty_label

class ThingForm(models.ModelForm):

class Meta:
model = Thing

def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
super(ThingForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
self.fields['verb'].empty_label = None
self.fields['verb'].queryset=Verb.objects.all()


bbasically, the first line under init can be applied for all of the fields in the form with a loop or inline loop:

init

def __init__(self,user, *args, **kwargs):
super(NewTicket, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
for f in self.fields:
self.fields[f].empty_label = None # or "Please Select" etc


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