Schinckel.net

I have a recurring pattern I’m seeing, where I have a field in a model that needs to be read-only. It usually is a Company to which an object belongs, but it also occurs in the case where an object belongs to some collection, and isn’t permitted to be moved to a different collection.

Whilst there are some workarounds that apply the field’s value to the instance after creating, it’s nicer to be able to apply the read-only nature declaratively, and not have to remember to do something in the form itself.

Unfortunately, in django, normal field subclasses don’t have access to the initial argument that was used to construct it. But forms.FileField objects do. So we can abuse that a little.

We also need a widget, that will always return False for questions about if the value has been changed, and re-render with the initial value at all times.

from django import forms

class ReadOnlyWidget(forms.HiddenInput):
    def render(self, name, value, attrs):
      value = getattr(self, 'initial', value)
      return super(ReadOnlyWidget, self).render(name, value, attrs)
    
    def _has_changed(self, initial, data):
      return False

class ReadOnlyField(forms.FileField):
  widget = forms.HiddenInput
  
  def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
    forms.Field.__init__(self, *args, **kwargs)
  
  def clean(self, value, initial):
    self.widget.initial = initial
    return initial

So, that’s all well and good. But a common use for me was for this field to be a related field: a Company as described above, or a User.

Enter ReadOnlyModelField, and ReadOnlyUserField.

Now, ReadOnlyModelField is a bit tricky: it’s not actually a class, but a factory function, so we will look at ReadOnlyUserField first:

class ReadOnlyUserField(ReadOnlyField):
  def clean(self, value, initial):
    initial = super(ReadOnlyUserField, self).clean(value, initial)
    return User.objects.get(pk=initial)

Note, it will have a database query.

Now, we are ready to look at a more general case:

def ReadOnlyModelField(ModelClass, *args, **kwargs):
  class ReadOnlyModelField(ReadOnlyField):
    def clean(self, value, initial):
      initial = super(ReadOnlyModelField, self).clean(value, initial)
      return ModelClass.objects.get(pk=initial)
  return ReadOnlyModelField(*args, **kwargs)

This is a bit tricky. We create a function that looks like a class, but actually creates a new class when it is called. This is so we can use it in a form definition:

class MyForm(forms.ModelForm):
  company = ReadOnlyModelField(Company)
  
  class Meta:
    model = MyModel