Using **kwargs with CherryPy and WTForms
I just ran into a problem with using **kwargs as a catchall parameter in cherrypy while sending the data into a form built with WTForms. Like this:
def index(self, **kwargs):
sf = forms.SearchForm(kwargs)
This leads to an error:
TypeError: formdata should be a multidict-type wrapper that supports the 'getlist' method
The reason is that WTForms expects something that supports the ‘getlist’ method while kwargs is a plain dictionary and does not have any ‘getlist’ method. The solution i found was to subclass dict and just add the getlist method. As far as I know, getlist refers to a method in the official cgi module and the cgi module documentation says that
This method always returns a list of values associated with form field name. The method returns an empty list if no such form field or value exists for name. It returns a list consisting of one item if only one such value exists.
So, a simple implementation of a subclass of dict that just adds the getlist method looks like this:
class InputDict(dict):
def getlist(self, arg):
for key in self.keys():
if self.has_key(arg):
if isinstance(self[arg], list):
return self[arg]
else:
return [self[arg]]
else:
return []
And we can use it to fill our form:
def index(self, **kwargs):
sf = forms.SearchForm(InputDict(kwargs))