Custom attribute values in Django form field widgets

This has frustrated me for so long.

If you want to use checkboxes in a form in Django, the obvious choice is BooleanField. There are times it would be really useful to have the value attribute filled out, but by default, Django just checks for the presence of the field to decide if it’s set or not, so the checkbox’s value attribute isn’t used at all.

There are specific times you really want the checkbox widget to have a value, but it’s not at all obvious how you actually do it. Hunting around the documentation doesn’t reveal any way to do it, but if you dig around the code, there’s a way: Field.widget_attrs(). It takes a Widget instance (so you can inspect it), and returns a dictionary of attributes to add to the widget.

For example, if we wanted to ensure that the value attributes was present and had the value 1, here’s what we’d do:

class BooleanField(forms.BooleanField):

    def widget_attrs(self, widget):
        attrs = super(BooleanField, self).widget_attrs(widget)
        attrs['value'] = '1'
        return attrs

It’s frustrating that there’s no documentation how to do this.