Making a Django form class with a dynamic number of fields

I'm working on something like an online store. I'm making a form in which the customer buys an item, and she can choose how many of these item she would like to buy. But, on every item that she buys she needs to choose what its color would be. So there's a non-constant number of fields: If the customer buys 3 items, she should get 3 <select> boxes for choosing a color, if she buys 7 items, she should get 7 such <select> boxes.

I'll make the HTML form fields appear and disappear using JavaScript. But how do I deal with this on my Django form class? I see that form fields are class attributes, so I don't know how to deal with the fact that some form instance should have 3 color fields and some 7.

Any clue?

Jacob Kaplan-Moss has an extensive writeup on dynamic form fields: http://jacobian.org/writing/dynamic-form-generation/

Essentially, you add more items to the form's self.fields dictionary during instantiation.

Here's another option: how about a formset? Since your fields are all the same, that's precisely what formsets are used for.

The django admin uses FormSets + a bit of javascript to add arbitrary length inlines.

class ColorForm(forms.Form):
    color = forms.ChoiceField(choices=(('blue', 'Blue'), ('red', 'Red')))

ColorFormSet = formset_factory(ColorForm, extra=0) 
# we'll dynamically create the elements, no need for any forms

def myview(request):
    if request.method == "POST":
        formset = ColorFormSet(request.POST)
        for form in formset.forms:
            print "You've picked {0}".format(form.cleaned_data['color'])
    else:
        formset = ColorFormSet()
    return render(request, 'template', {'formset': formset}))

JavaScript

    <script>
        $(function() {
            // this is on click event just to demo.
            // You would probably run this at page load or quantity change.
            $("#generate_forms").click(function() {
                // update total form count
                quantity = $("[name=quantity]").val();
                $("[name=form-TOTAL_FORMS]").val(quantity);  

                // copy the template and replace prefixes with the correct index
                for (i=0;i<quantity;i++) {
                    // Note: Must use global replace here
                    html = $("#form_template").clone().html().replace(/__prefix_/g', i);
                    $("#forms").append(html);
                };
            })
        })
    </script>

Template

    <form method="post">
        {{ formset.management_form }}
        <div style="display:none;" id="form_template">
            {{ formset.empty_form.as_p }}
        </div><!-- stores empty form for javascript -->
        <div id="forms"></div><!-- where the generated forms go -->
    </form>
    <input type="text" name="quantity" value="6" />
    <input type="submit" id="generate_forms" value="Generate Forms" />

you can do it like

def __init__(self, n,  *args, **kwargs):
  super(your_form, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
  for i in range(0, n):
    self.fields["field_name %d" % i] = forms.CharField()

and when you create form instance, you just do

forms = your_form(n)

it's just the basic idea, you can change the code to whatever your want. :D