Question

How can one accomplish class-based default value in following scheme? I mean, I would like to inherited classes set default value for “number” differently:

class OrderDocumentBase(PdfPrintable):
    number = models.PositiveIntegerField(default=self.create_number())

    @classmethod
    def create_number(cls):
        raise NotImplementedError

class Invoice(OrderDocumentBase):
    @classmethod
    def create_number(cls):
        return 1

class CreditAdvice(OrderDocumentBase):
    @classmethod
    def create_number(cls):
        return 2

I have looked at this stackoverflow question, but it doesn’t address the same problem. The only thing I thought would work was overloading OrderDocumentBase‘s __init__ method like this:

def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
    """
    Overload __init__ to enable dynamic set of default to number
    """
    super(OrderDocumentBase, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
    number_field = filter(lambda x: x.name == 'number', self._meta.fields)[0]
    number = self.__class__.create_number()
    number_field.default = number

This works, but only partially and behaves quite wierdly. In admin interface, I can see the default being set only after second or latter page refresh. On first try, None is being set 🙁

Second possibility is redefinition of number field in each class, but that doesn’t seem too much pretty. Is there any other way?

Can someone help?

Answer 1

It does feel nicer to do this via default=, but anything you use there doesn’t have a way to get at your class or specific model. To have it show up properly in places like the admin, you could set it in init() instead of save().

class OrderDocumentBase(PdfPrintable):
    number = models.PositiveIntegerField()

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(OrderDocumentBase, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        if not self.pk and not self.number:
            self.number = self.DEFAULT_NUMBER

class Invoice(OrderDocumentBase):
    DEFAULT_NUMBER = 2

class CreditAdvice(OrderDocumentBase):
    DEFAULT_NUMBER = 3