Question

I bit confuse with __unicode__() in django. I’m still a newbie.

I have this code:

models.py

class Order(models.Model):
    order_num = models.IntegerField(verbose_name="OR Number")
    order_date = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True,verbose_name="OR Date")
    customer = models.ForeignKey(User)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.order_num

I register it on the admin side. When I tried to add order it has an error:

TypeError at /admin/store/order/add/
coercing to Unicode: need string or buffer, int found

What will I declare on the method __unicode__(self)?

It is clear I don’t have string on my fields. How can I declare buffer?

or

Anyone has another answer.. please help.. Thanks.

Answer 1

__unicode__ needs to return a unicode object.

The error you see is because only string or buffer-protocol objects can be automatically converted (it’s still better to explicitly convert them).

For built-in Python types, or any user-defined class that has its own __unicode__ method, you can just call unicode on them:

def __unicode__(self):
    return unicode(self.order_num)