How to access Django's field.choices?

Is there a way (without using a form) to access a model fields choices value?

I want to do something like field.choices and get the list of values either in a view or template.

Sure. Just access the choices attribute of a Model field:

MyModel._meta.get_field('foo').choices
my_instance._meta.get_field('foo').choices

If you're declaring your choices like this:

class Topic(models.Model):

    PRIMARY = 1
    PRIMARY_SECONDARY = 2
    TOPIC_LEVEL = ((PRIMARY, 'Primary'),
                  (PRIMARY_SECONDARY, 'Primary & Secondary'),)

    topic_level = models.IntegerField('Topic Level', choices=TOPIC_LEVEL,
            default=1)

Which is a good way of doing it really. See: http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2007/nov/02/handle-choices-right-way/

Then you can get back the choices simply with Topic.TOPIC_LEVEL