When saving, how can you check if a field has changed?

Question

In my model I have :

class Alias(MyBaseModel):
    remote_image = models.URLField(max_length=500, null=True, help_text=\"A URL that is downloaded and cached          


        

Answer 1

Essentially, you want to override the __init__ method of models.Model so that you keep a copy of the original value. This makes it so that you don't have to do another DB lookup (which is always a good thing).

class Person(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField()

    __original_name = None

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(Person, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self.__original_name = self.name

    def save(self, force_insert=False, force_update=False, *args, **kwargs):
        if self.name != self.__original_name:
            # name changed - do something here

        super(Person, self).save(force_insert, force_update, *args, **kwargs)
        self.__original_name = self.name