How to Create Field for Multiple Choices in Django

This article will present how to make a field for multiple choices and show you how to allow users to select multiple options in Django.

Create Field for Multiple Choices in Django

Suppose you have a demosite website where users add their favorite books. Django has a default way that when you make choices, they will be a drop-down menu and limit a user to choose only one item.

Suppose we want to see multiple options for choosing one book; we will have more than one book option. Let’s see how we will do this.

So, first of all, we will get our Book model class ready. Open the models.py file and create a tuple with different book names.

Code:

from django.db import models


class Book(models.Model):
    BOOK_CHOICES = (
        ("Parks of being a wallflower", "Parks of being a wallflower"),
        ("All the bright places", "All the bright places"),
        ("The girl on the train", "The girl on the train"),
        ("Django", "Django"),
    )

Now, we need to create the first column or field in the database, which would be a title. The title field would be a CharField.

In this title field, we will pass the BOOK_CHOICES tuple to the choices argument. The choices argument will allow us to choose an option from the drop-down menu.

Code:

title = models.CharField(max_length=100, choices=BOOK_CHOICES)

Register this Book model in the admin.py file. So first, we need to import our Book model and then register it using admin.site.register().

Code:

from .models import Book

admin.site.register(Book)

Now, we need to open the setting.py file, find the INSTALLED_APPS list, and add our Django app to this list before migration. In this project, we are using a demo app.

Code:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    "demo",
]

Let’s open a terminal where the manage.py file directory exists and run the following commands to make migrations.

Commands:

python manage.py makemigrations demo

python manage.py migrate

Now, we have to create a superuser before running the server.

Command:

python manage.py createsuperuser

After running this command, we need to fulfill the user name, email, and password requirements. Then, we are good to run the server using the following command.

Command:

python manage.py runserver

After running the project, we need to open the admin page and log in to the page to access the admin panel.

Output:

Here, you can see that we can only choose one option.

If you want your user to choose more than one option, you must follow the instructions.

We will need a django-multiselectfield module to use the multiple option feature in our project. It is easy to use; follow this link to be able to use this feature.

At this moment, our models.py file contains the following code.

Code:

from multiselectfield import MultiSelectField
from django.db import models


class Book(models.Model):
    BOOK_CHOICES = (
        ("Parks of being a wallflower", "Parks of being a wallflower"),
        ("All the bright places", "All the bright places"),
        ("The girl on the train", "The girl on the train"),
        ("Django", "Django"),
    )
    title = MultiSelectField(choices=BOOK_CHOICES)

Output: