Question

Within Django, can a function local to a model be called on object creation to dynamically fill a field?

class someModel(models.Model):
    id = models.FloatField(primary_key=True, default=generate_id())

    def generate_id(self):
        newId=time.time()
        return newId

So far I haven’t had any luck with getting it to work or with locating documentation that covers it.

Answer 1

Yeah, this can be done using the signals framework.

from django.db import models
from django.core.signals import post_init

class SomeModel(models.Model):
    pass # *snip*

def generate_id(sender, **kwargs):
    kwargs.get('instance').newId = time.time()
        # ...

post_init.connect(SomeModel.generate_id)