Numeric Formatting in Django

You might have seen my previous post lamenting the weirdnesses around number formatting in python.  This spills over into Django; if you have DecimalFields in your models (especially if you are using the ModelForm object to create your forms.


The previous "format Decimal object as a string that any 10-year-old would expect" method is:

def dec_string(dec):
    if isinstance(dec, Decimal):
        if dec:
            if dec.normalize().as_tuple().exponent > 0:
                return "%d"%dec
            else:
                return "%s"%dec.normalize()
        else:
            return 0
    else:
        return dec

(I added the isinstance() bit to protect me from myself =)

Since we know how to format this, all that remains to be done is to create a widget that automatically formats DecimalFields correctly.

class DecimalInput(TextInput):
  def render(self, name, value, attrs=None):
    value = dec_string(value)
    return super(DecimalInput, self).render(name, value, attrs)

And then just use that in your form:

class EnergyForm(ModelForm):
    kwh = DecimalField(widget=DecimalInput(attrs={'size':'6'}))

There is more to the ModelForm, but that's what the docs are for, right?