Question

I am creating a form where a someone enters a network, location, and administrators of the network. This is my model —

class Administrator(models.Model):
    email = models.EmailField()
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100, blank=True)

class Network(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    location = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    administrators = models.ManyToManyField(Administrator, blank=True)

How could I create a form such that when the site admin adds an administrator to a network, it will immediately create that entry in the Administrator class and then link up to that in the administrators column?

Answer 1

For custom processing of your form objects use form.save(commit=False):

This save() method accepts an optional
commit keyword argument, which accepts
either True or False. If you call
save() with commit=False, then it will
return an object that hasn’t yet been
saved to the database. In this case,
it’s up to you to call save() on the
resulting model instance. This is
useful if you want to do custom
processing on the object before saving
it, or if you want to use one of the
specialized model saving options.

from: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.0/topics/forms/modelforms/#the-save-method

---

So if you have a NetworkForm you could use commit=False and then check if your administrator already exists or if he needs to be created. get_or_create is really handy for this.

Then you could set administrator on your form to the newly created or fetched administrator-instance and save the form (using form.save() and form.save_m2m()).