Question

Model:

class Comment(models.Model):
    date = models.DateTimeField(default = datetime.datetime.now)
    text = models.TextField()

Form:

class CommentForm(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = Comment

In template I have only “text” field. When I click on submit button, QueryDict in form.data contains only text, despite the default value for date field. How to set default value properly?

Answer 1

Update:

I figured that default=datetime.date.now behaved like auto_now_add=True because you mentioned that your template only contains the text field.

It turns out your situation is not handled any differently and you must display the date field in your form.

If you want to ignore it, you can override the ModelForm.save method to set the date yourself, or add it in your model save() definition.

You should look into the auto_now_add=True parameter in model field definitions which automatically adds this behavior of setting a date field to datetime.datetime.now() upon the first save.

date = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)