Question

Let’s say you’ve got a ActiveDirectoryUser model:

class ActiveDirectoryUser(models.Model):
    object_guid = models.CharField(max_length=200, unique=True)
    mail = models.EmailField(unique=True)
    name = models.CharField(max_length=200)

This model is populated from an Active Directory query. Every day, I rerun a job in batch that queries Active Directory, gets the results back, and checks if the person is already in AD. If they are it checks if anything has changed, and if not they get added to the Database. I found myself writing:

try:
    ad_user = ActiveDirectoryUser.objects.get(object_guid=object_guid)
    ad_user.object_guid = object_guid
    ad_user.mail = mail
    ad_user.name = name
    ad_user.save()

except ActiveDirectoryUser.DoesNotExist:
    ActiveDirectoryUser(
    object_guid=object_guid,
    mail=mail, 
    name=name).save()

Basically, I try to get the object with the attributes and if that throws a DoesNotExist exception, I know it’s not already there and so I create a new one. Is this the right/best/idiomatic way of either updating or saving a new object into the database? I know it works, but it looks wrong somehow. Inelegant.

Answer 1

No, django has a built-in way to do this.

entry, created = ActiveDirectory.objects.get_or_create(
    object_guid = 'your_value',
    name =  = 'your_value',
    mail = 'your_value'
)