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Django Dynamic Unsubscribe Forms

The normal usecase of Django forms is to have predefined fields in forms like this:

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from django import forms

class EmailPreferenceForm(forms.Form):
    daily_digest = forms.BooleanField(required=False)
    weekly_news = forms.BooleanField(required=False)
    monthly_summary = forms.BooleanField(required=False)

What if we wanted to add more fields to the form like weekly_digest and so on? Well, of course you would have to add a new field to the form and maybe handle extra work in your views. Let’s make this more dynamic.

Let’s create Event model which will store all events. Entries from this model will be generated into fields in the form later:

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from django.db import models

class Event(models.Model):

    title = models.CharField(
        max_length=100,
        help_text='e.g: Weekly News'
    )
    title_id = models.CharField(
        max_length=100,
        blank=True,
        editable=False
    )

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.title

    def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
        if not self.title_id:
            # Generate title_id based on title
            # Weekly News > weekly_news
            self.title_id = self.title.lower().replace(' ', '_').replace("'", '')

And now the form that will generate fields based on all entries in Event model

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from django import forms
from models import Event

class EmailPreferenceForm(forms.Form):
    # Auto generate fields based on title_id in Event
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(EmailPreferenceForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        fields = Event.objects.all()
        for f in fields:
            self.fields[f.title_id] = forms.BooleanField(required=False)

Let’s say you have a Subscriber model that has many Events. This piece of code will initialize the checkboxes based on subscribers’ preferences.

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from forms import EmailPreferenceForm

def email_preferences(request):
    if request.method == 'POST':
        email_preferences = EmailPreferenceForm(request.POST)
        # Process the form
    else:
        # Initialize the preferences. This will make the boxes checked.
        initial = {}
        for e in subscriber.events.all():
            initial[e.title_id] = True
        email_preferences = EmailPreferenceForm(initial=initial)

    # Context and HTTPResponses here

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