Django Autocomplete Light widget Select2Multiple returns a string of a list instead of a list of values

Question

I'm using Django Autocomplete Light widget Select2Multiple for a form field for tags. In form.clean(), the corresponding value is a string of list of the pk's of the tags, which looks like this:

form.clean()['tags']: "['1','2']"

Now, I can convert this to a list of integers and process the pk's individually but I feel like there should be a more obvious way to handle this.

Relevant field in forms.py:

tags = CharField(label='Tags',
                 max_length=50,
                 required=False,
                 widget=autocomplete.Select2Multiple(url='tag-autocomplete')
       )

PS: I can't use ModelSelect2Multiple as this form is for an object that hasn't yet ben created.

Answer 1

forms.CharField is not designed to handle a list of values. Since you are selecting model instances, you can use forms.ModelMultipleChoiceField:

tags = forms.ModelMultipleChoiceField(label='Tags',
                 queryset=Tag.objects.all(),
                 max_length=50,
                 required=False,
                 widget=autocomplete.Select2Multiple(url='tag-autocomplete')
       )