Question

I have a simple model which looks like this:

class Group(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length = 100, blank=False)

I would expect this to throw an integrity error, but it does not:

group = Group() # name is an empty string here
group.save()

How can I make sure that the name variable is set to something non-empty? I.e to make the database reject any attempts to save an empty string?

Answer 1

From the Django docs in this case, your name will be stored as an empty string, because the null field option is False by default. if you want to define a custom default value, use the default field option.

name = models.CharField(max_length=100, blank=False, default='somevalue')

On this page, you can see that the blank is not database-related.

Update:

You should override the clean function of your model, to have custom validation, so your model def will be:

class Group(models.Model):
  name = models.CharField(max_length=100, blank=False)
  def clean(self):
    from django.core.exceptions import ValidationError
    if self.name == '':
        raise ValidationError('Empty error message')

Or you can replace ValidationError to something else. Then before you call group.save() call group.full_clean() which will call clean()

Other validation related things are here.