Multiple Checkboxes using Flask WTForms

example.html

{% extends "layout_new.html" %}
{% block content_main %}
    <div class="content-section">
        <form method="POST" action="">
            {{ form.hidden_tag() }}
            <fieldset class="form-group">
                <legend class="border-bottom mb-4">User Choices</legend>
                {% if form.choices.errors %}
                <div class="invalid-feedback">
                    {% for error in form.choices.errors %}
                        <span>{{ error }}</span>
                    {% endfor %}
                </div>
                {% endif %}
                {% for choice in form.choices %}
                    <div class="form-check">
                        {{ choice(class="form-check-input") }}
                        {{ choice.label(class="form-check-label") }}
                    </div>
                {% endfor %}
            </fieldset>
            <div class="form-group">
                {{ form.submit(class="btn btn-outline-info") }}
            </div>
        </form>
    </div>
{% endblock content_main %}

form.py

class MultiCheckboxField(SelectMultipleField):
    widget = widgets.ListWidget(prefix_label=False)
    option_widget = widgets.CheckboxInput()

    
class ExampleForm(FlaskForm):
    choices = MultiCheckboxField('Routes', coerce=int)
    submit = SubmitField("Set User Choices")

route.py

@example.route("/example", methods=["GET", "POST"])
def example():
  form = ExampleForm()
  # populate the forms dynamically with the choices in the database
  form.check_options.choices = [(c.id, c.desc) for c in Choices.query.all()]
  # if it's a post request and we validated successfully
  if request.POST and form.validate_on_submit():
    # get our choices again, could technically cache these in a list if we wanted but w/e
    c_records = Choices.query.all()
    # need a list to hold our choices
    accepted = []
    # looping through the choices, we check the choice ID against what was passed in the form
    for choice in c_records:
      # when we find a match, we then append the Choice object to our list
      if choice.id in form.check_options.data:
        accepted.append(choice)
    # now all we have to do is update the users choices records
    user.choices = accepted
    db.session.add(user)
    db.session.commit(user)
  else:
    # tell the form what's already selected
    form.choices.data = [c.id for c in user.choices]
    return render_template('example.html', form=form)
  

user_modles.py

user_choices = app_db.Table('user_choices',
                   app_db.Column('user_id', app_db.Integer, app_db.ForeignKey('user.id'), primary_key=True),
                   app_db.Column('choice_id', app_db.Integer, app_db.ForeignKey('choice.id'), primary_key=True)
                   )

class User(db.Model, UserMixin):
  id = app_db.Column(app_db.Integer, primary_key=True)
  # other stuff as required
  choices = db.relationship('Choices', secondary=user_choices, lazy='subquery'
                            backref=db.backref('users_choice', lazy=True))

                            
class Choices(db.Model):
  id = app_db.Column(app_db.Integer, primary_key=True)
  desc = app_db.Column(app_db.String(25), nullable=False)

Sorry to anyone who stumbles on this, I didn't include imports or any fluff. This is some example code I'm jotting down for my own reference which handles multiple selections using check boxes since isn't a good solution for all options in which you wish to assign certain values (e.g a User Access Control setup where you want to check off allowed actions for a specific user). Note that a lot of this was C&P from a demo project I'm doing with Flask, so some names might be incorrect and the code might not function 100% out of the box, but if anything, I hope this helps anyone who was stuck on this problem as I was.

This is very helpful, thanks

Hi, thanks for the example. One thing I can't fully comprehend is: where did that form.check_options.choices come from? It looks like it should've been belong to the form.py but I can't quite figure out how. Could you please elaborate?

Hi, thanks for the example. One thing I can't fully comprehend is: where did that form.check_options.choices come from? It looks like it should've been belong to the form.py but I can't quite figure out how. Could you please elaborate?

Had to go dig around in my old code to figure out what was going on here as I haven't touched this code in quite some time, I think check_options is a typo or a renaming that didn't make it throughout the example. I believe it's actually suppose to be form.choices.choices based on the ExampleForm class as it's suppose to be reference to the selected options from the forms MultiCheckboxField which is choices = MultiCheckboxField('Routes', coerce=int) in the example code. Thinking about it now, chances are when I was copying the code to make this little reference, I changed the name from choices.choices to check_options.choices because it looked weird with choices.choices.

A more complete example is in my FlaskProductSiteDemo repo on Github. The domain/admin/routes.py and domain/admin/forms.py has a clearer naming example that doesn't have a random name appear out of the blue.

I believe it's actually suppose to be form.choices.choices based on the ExampleForm class as it's suppose to be reference to the selected options from the forms MultiCheckboxField which is choices = MultiCheckboxField('Routes', coerce=int) in the example code. Thinking about it now, chances are when I was copying the code to make this little reference, I changed the name from choices.choices to check_options.choices because it looked weird with choices.choices.

I guess that makes sense, yeah. Thanks for the quick reply.

A more complete example is in my FlaskProductSiteDemo repo on Github. The domain/admin/routes.py and domain/admin/forms.py has a clearer naming example that doesn't have a random name appear out of the blue.

I'll definitely check it.

Very useful, thank you!

This was helpful. Thanks!

Can't say enough about how much this helped me! As a note to others, I had to import "widgets" from wtforms.

# tell the form what's already selected
form.choices.data = [c.id for c in user.choices]

Thanks! 👍

Very valuable. Thanks a lot!

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