A new model field and form field. With this you can get a multiple select from a choices. Stores to the database as a CharField of comma-separated values.

This egg is inspired by this snippet.

Supported Python versions: 2.7, 3.4+

Supported Django versions: 1.4-2.0+

$ pip install django-multiselectfield

from multiselectfield import MultiSelectField

# ...

MY_CHOICES = (('item_key1', 'Item title 1.1'),
              ('item_key2', 'Item title 1.2'),
              ('item_key3', 'Item title 1.3'),
              ('item_key4', 'Item title 1.4'),
              ('item_key5', 'Item title 1.5'))

MY_CHOICES2 = ((1, 'Item title 2.1'),
               (2, 'Item title 2.2'),
               (3, 'Item title 2.3'),
               (4, 'Item title 2.4'),
               (5, 'Item title 2.5'))

class MyModel(models.Model):

    # .....

    my_field = MultiSelectField(choices=MY_CHOICES)
    my_field2 = MultiSelectField(choices=MY_CHOICES2,
                                 max_choices=3,
                                 max_length=3)

Only you need it, if you want the translation of django-multiselectfield

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.sites',
    'django.contrib.admin',

    #.....................#

    'multiselectfield',
)

It is possible to customize the HTML of this widget in your form template. To do so, you will need to loop through form.{field}.field.choices. Here is an example that displays the field label underneath/after the checkbox for a MultiSelectField called providers:

{% for value, text in form.providers.field.choices %}
  <div class="ui slider checkbox">
    <input id="id_providers_{{ forloop.counter0 }}" name="{{ form.providers.name }}" type="checkbox" value="{{ value }}"{% if value in checked_providers %} checked="checked"{% endif %}>
    <label>{{ text }}</label>
  </div>
{% endfor %}

Django REST Framework comes with a MultipleChoiceField that works perfectly with this:

from rest_framework import fields, serializers

from myapp.models import MY_CHOICES, MY_CHOICES2

class MyModelSerializer(serializers.HyperlinkedModelSerializer):
    # ...
    my_field = fields.MultipleChoiceField(choices=MY_CHOICES)
    my_field2 = fields.MultipleChoiceField(choices=MY_CHOICES2)
    # ...

All tests pass on Django 1.4, 1.5, and 1.8+, so if you can, use a modern version of Django. However, if you must use Django 1.6 or 1.7 there are two known issues you will need to be aware of:

1. Named groups do not render properly in Django 1.6. The workaround is to manually render the field in your form or use a custom widget. If your workaround is suitably generic, please submit a pull request with it.

2. Only in Django 1.6 and 1.7, due to Django bug #9619, passing a MultiSelectField to values() or values_list() will return the database representation of the field (a string of comma-separated values). The workaround is to manually call .split(',') on the result.

   The Django bug was introduced in Django 1.6 and is fixed in Django 1.8 and onward, so values() and values_list() return a vanilla Python list of values for Django <= 1.5 and Django >= 1.8.

   See issue #40 for discussion about this bug.

You can get the last bleeding edge version of django-multiselectfield by doing a clone of its git repository:

git clone https://github.com/goinnn/django-multiselectfield

There is a fully configured example project in the example directory. You can run it as usual:

python manage.py migrate  # or python manage.py syncdb --noinput
python manage.py loaddata app_data
python manage.py runserver