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

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. :-)

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

Answer 2

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.

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

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

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]]

Answer 3

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),
        }

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

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

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.