Customize/remove Django select box blank option

Question

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

Answer 1

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

What we should do is to remove first choice:

1 . If you want to build a BaseForm auto detect 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:]

Answer 2

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)`

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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:

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:

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

Answer 6

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