I am using James Bennetts code (link text) to create a dynamic form. Everything is working ok but I have now come to the point where I need to save the data and have become a bit stuck. I know I can assess the data returned by the form and simply save this to the database as a string but what I'd really like to do is save what type of data it is e.g. date, integer, varchar along with the value so that when it comes to viewing the data I can do some processing on it depending on what type it is e.g. get dates greater than last week.
So my question is how do I access what database type the form element is based on what type of form element it is e.g. a django.forms.IntegerField has a database field type of int, django.forms.DateField would be a date field and django.forms.ChoiceField would be a varchar field?
gruszczy :
Why do you want to know, what kind of database field you are using? Are you storing information from the form through raw sql? You should have some model, that you are storing information from the form and it will do all the work for you.\n\nMaybe you could show some form code? Right now it's hard to determine, what exactly you are trying to do.",
2009-11-28T16:12:12
shylent :
I can not understand the exact problem, so forgive me if I get things wrong.\n\nIf you are using models, then you don't need to know about database-level data types. They are defined by django according to your model fields.\n\nHowever, since you are talking about dynamic forms (I've read the article), you are probably not working with models, at least not directly. In that case, it should not matter as well, because you are using form validation so, for example, you can be absolutely sure that an integer comes out of a forms.IntegerField field, unicode comes out of forms.CharField and so on.\n\nIf you are writing your database-interaction routies by hand (raw sql), then you have to map python-types to db-types yourself, for example <type 'int'> goes to a column of type integer (or something), <type 'datetime.datetime'> goes to a datetime type of column (or not, this example is arbitrary) and so on. When you are using models, django does this type of mapping for you in a database-engine-independent way.\n\nEither way, you, yourself are defining the datatypes on the python side and you or django must also define the datatypes on the db side. The choice of those types is, at times, not an automatic 1:1 type of decision, but, rather, a design decision, based on what this data is used for in your application.\n\nSorry, if this makes little sense, but, I must admit, that I don't quite understand the problem behind your question.",
2009-11-28T16:44:03