Thanks for the reply Collin, and thanks for the warning about this being 
more complicated than it seemed at first.  I later discovered that I needed 
to set the hidden fields that contain the foreign and instance keys as 
well.  For completeness, the below code is working for me given the fact 
that I only have simple fields.

# helper functions
def bind_formset(formset):
    """
    Bind initial data to a formset
    """
    if formset.is_bound:
        # do nothing if the formset is already bound
        return formset
    
    bindData={}
    # the formset.get_default_prefix() and form.add_prefix() methods add in 
the 
    # dict keys that uniquely identify the various form fields with the 
individual 
    # instance data
    
    # add formset management form data
    bindData[formset.get_default_prefix()+"-TOTAL_FORMS"]=str(formset.
management_form['TOTAL_FORMS'].value())
    bindData[formset.get_default_prefix()+"-INITIAL_FORMS"]=str(formset.
management_form['INITIAL_FORMS'].value())
    bindData[formset.get_default_prefix()+"-MIN_NUM_FORMS"]=str(formset.
management_form['MIN_NUM_FORMS'].value())
    bindData[formset.get_default_prefix()+"-MAX_NUM_FORMS"]=str(formset.
management_form['MAX_NUM_FORMS'].value())
    for form in formset:
        if form.instance:
            # field data, get these values from the instance
            for fieldName,fieldValue in form.fields.iteritems():
                try:
                    bindData[form.add_prefix(fieldName)]=getattr(form.
instance,
                                                                 fieldName)
                except AttributeError:
                    # this is an added field (i.e. DELETE), not derived 
from the
                    # model, do nothing with it, since we are only binding 
instance
                    # data to the form
                    pass
            # hidden field data, get these from the field initial values set
            # when the form was created
            for field in form.hidden_fields():
                bindData[form.add_prefix(field.name)]=field.field.initial
    # create a new bound formset by passing in the bindData dict, this looks
    # to the formset constructor like a request.POST dict 
    newFormset=formset.__class__(bindData,instance=formset.instance,
                                 error_class=formset.error_class)
    return newFormset



On Thursday, January 22, 2015 at 8:36:08 PM UTC-5, Collin Anderson wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Interesting. I've never heard of someone wanting to show validation errors 
> on the initial data when the page first loads.
>
> I have however wanted to manually bind data to a form before. Last time I 
> checked it's not super trivial, because you could for instance have a 
> SplitDateTimeWidget which actually expects _two_ keys in the bound data.
>
> If you're just doing basic fields, that should work. If you're doing 
> anything more complicated, it might make sense to run the validation more 
> by hand. If you could call field.clean() on the less raw data you could 
> skip widgets and prefixes all together.
>
> Collin
>
> On Tuesday, January 20, 2015 at 8:06:06 AM UTC-5, Rob Groves wrote:
>>
>> Hi All,
>> I am new to Django and am enjoying it very much.  Excellent 
>> documentation, tutorials, and general environment to work in.  Good job 
>> Django developers!
>>
>> I have a question on binding data to a ModelFormset.  I have looked 
>> extensively and not seen this particular issue covered before.
>>
>> I have a ModelFormset that I send to a template for custom rendering so I 
>> can present the fields in a controlled tabular format.  The ultimate goal 
>> is to use CSS to create a red bounding box around any fields with 
>> validation errors and to set the "title" attribute of those input fields so 
>> that the user can see what errors were generated  by hovering over the red 
>> bounded field.  This presents a nice clean interface when there are 
>> errors.  It all works great, with one annoyance if the model data starts 
>> out with values that will generate validation errors (i.e. missing required 
>> data).  
>>
>> I initially call the view with a GET, which creates the forms and 
>> populates the form fields.  Since the data is not bound to forms at this 
>> point, I can't validate and set the errors.  In order to validate the 
>> fields and set the table error borders, I have to submit the form using 
>> POST to bind the data, validate the form and generate the errors which 
>> ultimately set an error_class for styling the table.  This means that I 
>> have to "save" the from from my form page to get the table style I want.
>>
>> What I really want is to instantiate a ModelFormset, setting the 
>> instance, but then to bind the data present in the instance and set errors 
>> by sending is_valid() to the formset before rendering (i.e. on initial page 
>> rendering with the GET, so no POST data).  It seemed to me that there 
>> should simply be a bind_instance() function for all ModelFormsets that 
>> contain an instance.  I looked and didn't find that.  Eventually, I just 
>> decided to bind the data myself manually using the following helper 
>> function:
>>
>> # helper functions
>> def bind_formset(formset):
>>     bindData={}
>>     # add management form data
>>     bindData[formset.get_default_prefix()+"-TOTAL_FORMS"]=str(formset.
>> management_form['TOTAL_FORMS'].value())
>>     bindData[formset.get_default_prefix()+"-INITIAL_FORMS"]=str(formset.
>> management_form['INITIAL_FORMS'].value())
>>     bindData[formset.get_default_prefix()+"-MIN_NUM_FORMS"]=str(formset.
>> management_form['MIN_NUM_FORMS'].value())
>>     bindData[formset.get_default_prefix()+"-MAX_NUM_FORMS"]=str(formset.
>> management_form['MAX_NUM_FORMS'].value())
>>     for form in formset:
>>         if form.instance:
>>             for fieldName,fieldValue in form.fields.iteritems():
>>                 try:
>>                     bindData[form.add_prefix(fieldName)]=getattr(form.
>> instance,fieldName)
>>                 except:
>>                     # this is an added field, not derived from the model
>>                     pass
>>     newFormset=formset.__class__(bindData,instance=formset.instance,
>>                                   queryset=formset.queryset, error_class=
>> formset.error_class)
>>     return newFormset
>>
>> This works!  My question... Is this a reasonable approach?  Or did I just 
>> miss the obvious way of doing this?
>>
>> Thanks for any help!
>>
>

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