Django BooleanField vs Proposed ToggleField

Your proposal for a ToggleField in Django forms is interesting. Let me provide some context about the current BooleanField implementation and how your proposed ToggleField would differ.

Current BooleanField Behavior

Django's BooleanField has the following characteristics:

• Default widget: CheckboxInput
• Empty value: False
• Normalizes to: A Python True or False value
• By default, it has required=True (like all Field subclasses)
• When required=True, it validates that the value is True (checkbox is checked)
• The default value is None when no default is defined (for model fields)

A key point to understand is that if you want a checkbox that can be either checked or unchecked (True or False), you must explicitly set required=False when creating the BooleanField.

Your Proposed ToggleField

Your proposed ToggleField would differ by:

1. Never being required, regardless of how it's defined
2. Defaulting to required=False
3. Always returning False in cleaned data if not provided
4. Having an initial value of False by default
5. Suppressing validation errors on invalid data
6. Including accessibility-focused widget attributes

Implementation Considerations

This could be implemented by subclassing BooleanField and overriding its behavior. For example:

PYTHONCopied
from django import forms

class ToggleWidget(forms.CheckboxInput):
    def __init__(self, attrs=None):
        default_attrs = {'role': 'switch'}
        if attrs:
            default_attrs.update(attrs)
        super().__init__(attrs=default_attrs)
    
    def get_context(self, name, value, attrs):
        context = super().get_context(name, value, attrs)
        context['widget']['attrs']['aria-checked'] = 'true' if value else 'false'
        return context

class ToggleField(forms.BooleanField):
    widget = ToggleWidget
    
    def __init__(self, **kwargs):
        kwargs['required'] = False  # Always set required to False
        kwargs.setdefault('initial', False)  # Default initial value to False
        super().__init__(**kwargs)
    
    def clean(self, value):
        # Always return False if not provided, suppress validation errors
        if not value:
            return False
        return True

This implementation would achieve most of your requirements while building on Django's existing BooleanField functionality.

The proposal could be valuable for projects that frequently use toggle switches in forms, as it would standardize the implementation and reduce repetitive code.