I have a model that looks like:

class MySchedule(models.Model):
  start_datetime=models.DateTimeField()
  name=models.CharField('Name',max_length=75)

With it comes its ModelForm:

class MyScheduleForm(forms.ModelForm):
  startdate=forms.DateField()
  starthour=forms.ChoiceField(choices=((6,"6am"),(7,"7am"),(8,"8am"),(9,"9am"),(10,"10am"),(11,"11am"),
      (12,"noon"),(13,"1pm"),(14,"2pm"),(15,"3pm"),(16,"4pm"),(17,"5pm"),
      (18,"6pm"
  startminute=forms.ChoiceField(choices=((0,":00"),(15,":15"),(30,":30"),(45,":45")))),(19,"7pm"),(20,"8pm"),(21,"9pm"),(22,"10pm"),(23,"11pm")))

  class Meta:
    model=MySchedule

  def clean(self):
    starttime=time(int(self.cleaned_data.get('starthour')),int(self.cleaned_data.get('startminute')))
    return self.cleaned_data

  try:
    self.instance.start_datetime=datetime.combine(self.cleaned_data.get("startdate"),starttime)

  except TypeError:
    raise forms.ValidationError("There's a problem with your start or end date")

Basically, I'm trying to break the DateTime field in the model into 3 more easily usable form fields -- a date picker, an hour dropdown, and a minute dropdown. Then, once I've gotten the three inputs, I reassemble them into a DateTime and save it to the model.

A few questions:

1) Is this totally the wrong way to go about doing it? I don't want to create fields in the model for hours, minutes, etc, since that's all basically just intermediary data, so I'd like a way to break the DateTime field into sub-fields.

2) The difficulty I'm running into is when the startdate field is blank -- it seems like it never gets checked for non-blankness, and just ends up throwing up a TypeError later when the program expects a date and gets None. Where does Django check for blank inputs, and raise the error that eventually goes back to the form? Is this my responsibility? If so, how do I do it, since it doesn't evaluate clean_startdate() since startdate isn't in the model.

3) Is there some better way to do this with inheritance? Perhaps inherit the MyScheduleForm in BetterScheduleForm and add the fields there? How would I do this? (I've been playing around with it for over an hours and can't seem to get it)

Thanks!

[Edit:] Left off the return self.cleaned_data -- lost it in the copy/paste originally