Question

I’m following Beginning Django E-Commerce but I found a part regarding user profiles a bit perplexing. Basically, I have an abstract class like this:

class BaseOrderInfo(models.Model):
  class Meta:
    abstract = True
    # a bunch of fields follow
    shipping_name = models.CharField()
    # etc

After this, a UserProfile class inherits BaseOrderInfo:

class UserProfile(BaseOrderInfo):
  user = models.ForeignKey(User, unique = True)
  # Possibly other methods or fields here

Finally, there is a retrieve method which, as its name suggests, retrieves a user profile (if this user profile doesn’t exist, it creates one for that User object):

def retrieve(request):
  try:
    profile = request.user.get_profile()
  except UserProfile.DoesNotExist:
    profile = UserProfile(user=request.user)
    profile.save()
  return profile

Well, my question is the following: How is it possible to save this UserProfile instance in the retrieve method by only adding a User instance given the fact that UserProfile inherited quite a few other fields from the BaseOrderInfo class? As far as I know, Model and ModelForm create required fields by default.

Thanks

Answer 1

Django does not validate the model when the form is saved. (See the docs on Validating Objects). If you explicitly call profile.full_clean() before saving, then you will see the validation errors.

If a required foreign key was not specified, then you would get a database IntegrityError. Other required fields are validated by Django, not the database. If Django does not validate the model, there will not be any errors saving an empty string to a CharField in the database.