Setting the selected value on a Django forms.ChoiceField

Try setting the initial value when you instantiate the form:

form = MyForm(initial={'max_number': '3'})

This doesn't touch on the immediate question at hand, but this Q/A comes up for searches related to trying to assign the selected value to a ChoiceField.

If you have already called super().__init__ in your Form class, you should update the form.initial dictionary, not the field.initial property. If you study form.initial (e.g. print self.initial after the call to super().__init__), it will contain values for all the fields. Having a value of None in that dict will override the field.initial value.

e.g.

class MyForm(forms.Form):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(MyForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        # assign a (computed, I assume) default value to the choice field
        self.initial['choices_field_name'] = 'default value'
        # you should NOT do this:
        self.fields['choices_field_name'].initial = 'default value'

You can also do the following. in your form class def:

max_number = forms.ChoiceField(widget = forms.Select(), 
                 choices = ([('1','1'), ('2','2'),('3','3'), ]), initial='3', required = True,)

then when calling the form in your view you can dynamically set both initial choices and choice list.

yourFormInstance = YourFormClass()

yourFormInstance.fields['max_number'].choices = [(1,1),(2,2),(3,3)]
yourFormInstance.fields['max_number'].initial = [1]

Note: the initial values has to be a list and the choices has to be 2-tuples, in my example above i have a list of 2-tuples. Hope this helps.

I ran into this problem as well, and figured out that the problem is in the browser. When you refresh the browser is re-populating the form with the same values as before, ignoring the checked field. If you view source, you'll see the checked value is correct. Or put your cursor in your browser's URL field and hit enter. That will re-load the form from scratch.

Both Tom and Burton's answers work for me eventually, but I had a little trouble figuring out how to apply them to a ModelChoiceField.

The only trick to it is that the choices are stored as tuples of (<model's ID>, <model's unicode repr>), so if you want to set the initial model selection, you pass the model's ID as the initial value, not the object itself or it's name or anything else. Then it's as simple as:

form = EmployeeForm(initial={'manager': manager_employee_id})

Alternatively the initial argument can be ignored in place of an extra line with:

form.fields['manager'].initial = manager_employee_id

Dave - any luck finding a solution to the browser problem? Is there a way to force a refresh?

As for the original problem, try the following when initializing the form:

def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
  super(MyForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)   
  self.base_fields['MyChoiceField'].initial = initial_value

To be sure I need to see how you're rendering the form. The initial value is only used in a unbound form, if it's bound and a value for that field is not included nothing will be selected.