[SOLVED] Django Model Choice Field How to return the primary key of the object instead of the display value

Django Model Choice Field How to return the primary key of the object instead of the display value

I am trying to use the modelchoicefield that Django provides; however, it is not behaving the way I expected.

I want the display to the end user to be a string value from my model (which works), but return a the primary key of the Model when the user submits the form (not the display value). I attempted to use the to_field_name="id" on the Django form and it does render the values correctly when the HTML is rendered, but when the user submits the form the value I get back is the display value, not the primary key I am expecting.

customer_edit_form.py

annual_income = forms.ModelChoiceField(label='Annual income', to_field_name="id", queryset=cust_income_range.objects.all(), empty_label='-- None --')

models.py

# Annual Income Model
class cust_income_range(models.Model):
    id = models.IntegerField(primary_key=True)
    range = models.CharField(max_length=50)

    def __str__(self):
        return self.range

customer_view.py

annual_income = form.cleaned_data['annual_income']

Solution

After a lot of troubleshooing, I discovered that you can do something like this in the view to get the ID value instead of the str value.

annual_income = form.cleaned_data['annual_income'].pk