Change Django ModelChoiceField to show users' full names rather than usernames

Question

I have a form in my Django app (not in admin) that allows staff members to select a user from a dropdown.

forms.ModelChoiceField(queryset = User.objects.filter(is_staff=False), required = False)

The problem is that the dropdown shows users by usernames whereas I’d rather it show their full name from user.get_full_name() and use username only if that is not available. I only really need this change on this page, in other places like admin, I don’t care if it uses username.

Is there a way I can do this?

Thanks!

Asked By: Adam

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Source

Answer 1

You can override the field with a custom ModelChoiceField and change the label_from_instance function to return get_full_name instead. See the docs for ModelChoiceField: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2/ref/forms/fields/#modelchoicefield

Answered By: Mark Lavin

Answer 2

You can setup a custom ModelChoiceField that will return whatever label you’d like.

Place something like this within a fields.py or wherever applicable.

class UserModelChoiceField(ModelChoiceField):
    def label_from_instance(self, obj):
         return obj.get_full_name()

Then when creating your form, simply use that field

 UserModelChoiceField(queryset=User.objects.filter(is_staff=False), required = False)

More info can be found here

Answered By: Bartek

Answer 3

When working with a ModelForm, I found the following most useful so that I didn’t have to redefine my queryset – in particular because I used limit_choices_to in the model definition:

class MyModelForm(forms.ModelForm):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(MyModelForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self.fields['user'].label_from_instance = lambda obj: "%s" % obj.get_full_name()

customised from this answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/7805824/432992

Answered By: Kerridge0

Answer 4

If you want to change choices of the field in model form, try this adaptation of the Bartek’s answer:

model:

class MyModel(models.Model)
    user = models.ForeignKey(...)

form field:

class UserModelChoiceField(forms.ModelChoiceField):
    def label_from_instance(self, obj):
        return obj.get_full_name()

form:

class MyModelForm(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = MyModel
        fields = ['user']
        field_classes = {
            'user': UserModelChoiceField
        }

This approach will preserve params of the field (you don’t need to specify queryset, required and so on).

Answered By: lampslave

Answer 5

You can also make one custom ModelChoiceField to which you can pass a function. That way if you have different fields for which you want different attributes to be displayed, you can have only 1 class:

class CustomModelChoiceField(forms.ModelChoiceField):
name_function = staticmethod(lambda obj: obj)

def __init__(self, name_function, *args, **kwargs):
    if not name_function is None: self.name_function = name_function
    super(CustomModelChoiceField, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)

def label_from_instance(self, obj):
     return self.name_function(obj);

You can then call it as simply as this:

form_field = CustomModelChoiceField(
    lambda obj: obj.get_full_name(),
    queryset=Whatever.objects.all(),
)

You can also pass None in case you’re doing some dynamic stuff and it’ll just basically default to a regular ModelChoiceField. I’m not too much of a python guy but this works for me.

Answered By: TrisT

Change Django ModelChoiceField to show users' full names rather than usernames

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