How do I populate a hidden required field in django forms?

Question

I looked at other similar questions on Stackoverflow, but those situations do not apply to me.

I have a form with a Queue field that is a required field. This form is used in multiple places and in one such instance, I don't want the Queue field to be shown to the user. So, I simply did not render it on the template. But because this a required field, the form won't submit. How do I pre-populate this field while at the same time hiding it from the user?

I cannot make changes to the model or the form's save methods because this form is also used at other places.

forms.py

class PublicTicketForm(CustomFieldMixin, forms.Form):

    queue = forms.ChoiceField(
        widget=forms.Select(attrs={'class': 'form-control'}),
        label=_('Queue'),
        required=True,
        choices=()
    )

views.py:

def no_queue(request):

    if request.method == 'POST':
        form = PublicTicketForm(request.POST, request.FILES)
        form['queue'] = 9 # Tried to assign queue value to field, did not work

        if form.is_valid():
            if text_is_spam(form.cleaned_data['body'], request):
                # This submission is spam. Let's not save it.
                return render(request, template_name='helpdesk/public_spam.html')

            else:
                form.save()
    else:
        form = PublicTicketForm(initial={'queue': 9})  # tried this one too, did not work either
    return render(request, 'helpdesk/no_queue.html', {'form': form})

The choices for this form were populated in the views, but because I'm not rendering it in the template, I did not do it.

Answer 1

I was able to do something like this in the template and that worked!

<input type="hidden" name="queue" value="9" />