Fields

StatusField

A simple convenience for giving a model a set of “states.” StatusField is a CharField subclass that expects to find a class attribute called STATUS on its model or you can pass choices_name to use a different attribute name, and uses that as its choices. Also sets a default max_length of 100, and sets its default value to the first item in the STATUS choices:

from model_utils.fields import StatusField
from model_utils import Choices

class Article(models.Model):
    STATUS = Choices('draft', 'published')
    # ...
    status = StatusField()

(The STATUS class attribute does not have to be a Choices instance, it can be an ordinary list of two-tuples).

Using a different name for the model’s choices class attribute

from model_utils.fields import StatusField
from model_utils import Choices

class Article(models.Model):
    ANOTHER_CHOICES = Choices('draft', 'published')
    # ...
    another_field = StatusField(choices_name='ANOTHER_CHOICES')

StatusField does not set db_index=True automatically; if you expect to frequently filter on your status field (and it will have enough selectivity to make an index worthwhile) you may want to add this yourself.

MonitorField

A DateTimeField subclass that monitors another field on the model, and updates itself to the current date-time whenever the monitored field changes:

from model_utils.fields import MonitorField, StatusField

class Article(models.Model):
    STATUS = Choices('draft', 'published')

    status = StatusField()
    status_changed = MonitorField(monitor='status')

(A MonitorField can monitor any type of field for changes, not only a StatusField.)

If a list is passed to the when parameter, the field will only update when it matches one of the specified values:

from model_utils.fields import MonitorField, StatusField

class Article(models.Model):
    STATUS = Choices('draft', 'published')

    status = StatusField()
    published_at = MonitorField(monitor='status', when=['published'])

SplitField

A TextField subclass that automatically pulls an excerpt out of its content (based on a “split here” marker or a default number of initial paragraphs) and stores both its content and excerpt values in the database.

A SplitField is easy to add to any model definition:

from django.db import models
from model_utils.fields import SplitField

class Article(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    body = SplitField()

SplitField automatically creates an extra non-editable field _body_excerpt to store the excerpt. This field doesn’t need to be accessed directly; see below.

Accessing a SplitField on a model

When accessing an attribute of a model that was declared as a SplitField, a SplitText object is returned. The SplitText object has three attributes:

content:

The full field contents.

excerpt:

The excerpt of content (read-only).

has_more:

True if the excerpt and content are different, False otherwise.

This object also has a __unicode__ method that returns the full content, allowing SplitField attributes to appear in templates without having to access content directly.

Assuming the Article model above:

>>> a = Article.objects.all()[0]
>>> a.body.content
u'some text\n\n<!-- split -->\n\nmore text'
>>> a.body.excerpt
u'some text\n'
>>> unicode(a.body)
u'some text\n\n<!-- split -->\n\nmore text'

Assignment to a.body is equivalent to assignment to a.body.content.

Note

a.body.excerpt is only updated when a.save() is called

Customized excerpting

By default, SplitField looks for the marker <!-- split --> alone on a line and takes everything before that marker as the excerpt. This marker can be customized by setting the SPLIT_MARKER setting.

If no marker is found in the content, the first two paragraphs (where paragraphs are blocks of text separated by a blank line) are taken to be the excerpt. This number can be customized by setting the SPLIT_DEFAULT_PARAGRAPHS setting.