Empty Label ChoiceField Django

How do you make ChoiceField's label behave like ModelChoiceField? Is there a way to set an empty_label, or at least show a blank field?

Forms.py:

    thing = forms.ModelChoiceField(queryset=Thing.objects.all(), empty_label='Label')
    color = forms.ChoiceField(choices=COLORS)
    year = forms.ChoiceField(choices=YEAR_CHOICES)

I have tried the solutions suggested here:

Stack Overflow Q - Setting CHOICES = [('','All')] + CHOICES resulted in an internal server error.

Stack Overflow Q2 - After defining ('', '---------'), in my choices, still defaulted to the first item in the list, not the ('', '---------'), choice.

Gist - Tried using EmptyChoiceField defined here, but did not work using Django 1.4.

But none of these have worked for me.. How would you solve this issue? Thanks for your ideas!

See the Django 1.11 documentation on ChoiceField. The 'empty value' for the ChoiceField is defined as the empty string '', so your list of tuples should contain a key of '' mapped to whatever value you want to show for the empty value.

### forms.py
from django.forms import Form, ChoiceField

CHOICE_LIST = [
    ('', '----'), # replace the value '----' with whatever you want, it won't matter
    (1, 'Rock'),
    (2, 'Hard Place')
]

class SomeForm (Form):

    some_choice = ChoiceField(choices=CHOICE_LIST, required=False)

Note, you can avoid a form error if you want the form field to be optional by using required=False

Also, if you already have a CHOICE_LIST without an empty value, you can insert one so it shows up first in the form drop-down menu:

CHOICE_LIST.insert(0, ('', '----'))

Here's the solution that I used:

from myapp.models import COLORS

COLORS_EMPTY = [('','---------')] + COLORS

class ColorBrowseForm(forms.Form):
    color = forms.ChoiceField(choices=COLORS_EMPTY, required=False, widget=forms.Select(attrs={'onchange': 'this.form.submit();'}))

You can try this (assuming your choices are tuples):

blank_choice = (('', '---------'),)
...
color = forms.ChoiceField(choices=blank_choice + COLORS)
year = forms.ChoiceField(choices=blank_choice + YEAR_CHOICES)

Also, I can't tell from your code whether this is a form or a ModelForm, but it it's the latter, no need to redefine the form field here (you can include the choices=COLORS and choices=YEAR_CHOICES directly in the model field.

Hope this helps.

I know you already accepted an answer but I just want to post this in case someone out there runs into the issue I was having, namely the accepted solution does not work with a ValueListQuerySet. The EmptyChoiceField, which you linked to, works perfectly for me (although I am using django 1.7).

class EmptyChoiceField(forms.ChoiceField):
    def __init__(self, choices=(), empty_label=None, required=True, widget=None, label=None, initial=None, help_text=None, *args, **kwargs):

        # prepend an empty label if it exists (and field is not required!)
        if not required and empty_label is not None:
            choices = tuple([(u'', empty_label)] + list(choices))

        super(EmptyChoiceField, self).__init__(choices=choices, required=required, widget=widget, label=label, initial=initial, help_text=help_text, *args, **kwargs) 

class FilterForm(forms.ModelForm):
    #place your other fields here 
    state = EmptyChoiceField(choices=People.objects.all().values_list("state", "state").distinct(), required=False, empty_label="Show All")

A little late to the party..

How about not modifying the choices at all and just handling it with a widget?

from django.db.models import BLANK_CHOICE_DASH

class EmptySelect(Select):
    empty_value = BLANK_CHOICE_DASH[0]
    empty_label = BLANK_CHOICE_DASH[1]

    @property
    def choices(self):
        yield (self.empty_value, self.empty_label,)
        for choice in self._choices:
            yield choice

    @choices.setter
    def choices(self, val):
        self._choices = val

Then just call it:

class SomeForm(forms.Form):
    # thing = forms.ModelChoiceField(queryset=Thing.objects.all(), empty_label='Label')
    color = forms.ChoiceField(choices=COLORS, widget=EmptySelect)
    year = forms.ChoiceField(choices=YEAR_CHOICES, widget=EmptySelect)

Naturally, the EmptySelect would be placed inside some kind of common/widgets.py code and then when ever you need it, just reference it.