Python – Automatic creation date for Django model form objects

djangodjango-modelspython

What's the best way to set a creation date for an object automatically, and also a field that will record when the object was last updated?

models.py:

created_at = models.DateTimeField(False, True, editable=False)
updated_at = models.DateTimeField(True, True, editable=False)

views.py:

if request.method == 'POST':
    form = MyForm(request.POST)
    if form.is_valid():
        obj = form.save(commit=False)
        obj.user = request.user
        obj.save()
        return HttpResponseRedirect('obj_list')

I get the error:

objects_object.created_at may not be NULL

Do I have to manually set this value myself? I thought that was the point of the parameters passed to DateTimeField (or are they just defaults, and since I've set editable=False they don't get displayed on the form, hence don't get submitted in the request, and therefore don't get put into the form?).

What's the best way of doing this? An __init__ method?

Best Answer

You can use the auto_now and auto_now_add options for updated_at and created_at respectively.

class MyModel(models.Model):
    created_at = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    updated_at = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=True)

Related Solutions

Extending the User model with custom fields in Django

The least painful and indeed Django-recommended way of doing this is through a OneToOneField(User) property.

Extending the existing User model

…

If you wish to store information related to User, you can use a one-to-one relationship to a model containing the fields for additional information. This one-to-one model is often called a profile model, as it might store non-auth related information about a site user.

That said, extending django.contrib.auth.models.User and supplanting it also works...

Substituting a custom User model

Some kinds of projects may have authentication requirements for which Django’s built-in User model is not always appropriate. For instance, on some sites it makes more sense to use an email address as your identification token instead of a username.

[Ed: Two warnings and a notification follow, mentioning that this is pretty drastic.]

I would definitely stay away from changing the actual User class in your Django source tree and/or copying and altering the auth module.

Python – How to get file creation & modification date/times in Python

Getting some sort of modification date in a cross-platform way is easy - just call os.path.getmtime(path) and you'll get the Unix timestamp of when the file at path was last modified.

Getting file creation dates, on the other hand, is fiddly and platform-dependent, differing even between the three big OSes:

On Windows, a file's ctime (documented at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/14h5k7ff.aspx) stores its creation date. You can access this in Python through os.path.getctime() or the .st_ctime attribute of the result of a call to os.stat(). This won't work on Unix, where the ctime is the last time that the file's attributes or content were changed.
On Mac, as well as some other Unix-based OSes, you can use the .st_birthtime attribute of the result of a call to os.stat().
On Linux, this is currently impossible, at least without writing a C extension for Python. Although some file systems commonly used with Linux do store creation dates (for example, ext4 stores them in st_crtime) , the Linux kernel offers no way of accessing them; in particular, the structs it returns from stat() calls in C, as of the latest kernel version, don't contain any creation date fields. You can also see that the identifier st_crtime doesn't currently feature anywhere in the Python source. At least if you're on ext4, the data is attached to the inodes in the file system, but there's no convenient way of accessing it.

The next-best thing on Linux is to access the file's mtime, through either os.path.getmtime() or the .st_mtime attribute of an os.stat() result. This will give you the last time the file's content was modified, which may be adequate for some use cases.

Putting this all together, cross-platform code should look something like this...

import os
import platform

def creation_date(path_to_file):
    """
    Try to get the date that a file was created, falling back to when it was
    last modified if that isn't possible.
    See http://stackoverflow.com/a/39501288/1709587 for explanation.
    """
    if platform.system() == 'Windows':
        return os.path.getctime(path_to_file)
    else:
        stat = os.stat(path_to_file)
        try:
            return stat.st_birthtime
        except AttributeError:
            # We're probably on Linux. No easy way to get creation dates here,
            # so we'll settle for when its content was last modified.
            return stat.st_mtime

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Extending the User model with custom fields in Django

Extending the existing User model

Substituting a custom User model

Python – How to get file creation & modification date/times in Python

Related Topic