Question

I wrote most of my web applications with Django frameworks. Recently I looked into Ruby on rails and found some interesting things. Like ModelObject.find_or_create_by_id()

Here is some Django code I have

    try:
            phone = request.POST.get('phone')
            customer = Customer.objects.get(phone=phone)
            updating customer...     
    except: 
            customer=Customer(
                creating customer...            
            )
            customer.save() 

This piece of code looks ugly. Is there a better way to do this with Django ?

Answer 1

You can use get_or_create:

customer, created = Customer.objects.get_or_create(phone=phone)

The second value (created) is a boolean indicating if an existing object was retrieved or a new one created.

Documentation:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/ref/models/querysets/#get-or-create