Django Forms: Alternate Date Handling

For usability on the "score" page at Sage Steps (free registration required if you want to check it out), we decided that the best method to present a date was a simple drop-down with, e.g. "February 2010" as the text.

I tried out several permutations with mixed luck, but then happened upon the following recipe:

def month_year():
    today = date.today()
    today = date(today.year, today.month, 1)
    dates = []
    for i in range(1,13):
        if (today.month > i):
            month = today.month - i
            year = today.year
        else:
            month = 12-(i-today.month)
            year = today.year - 1
        mon = date(year, month, 1)
        dates.append((mon, mon.strftime("%B %Y")))
    dates.reverse()
    return dates

This creates a set of tuples, e.g.: (date(2009,3,1), 'March 2009'),

month = DateField(widget=Select(choices=month_year()))

This will produce the drop-down as above, and

form.cleaned_data['month']

Will actually return a datetime.date object (trust me, that's a good thing).