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

The mixin from @ivanlivski is great.

I've extended it to

• Ensure it works with Decimal fields.
• Expose properties to simplify usage

The updated code is available here: https://github.com/sknutsonsf/python-contrib/blob/master/src/django/utils/ModelDiffMixin.py

To help people new to Python or Django, I'll give a more complete example. This particular usage is to take a file from a data provider and ensure the records in the database reflect the file.

My model object:

class Station(ModelDiffMixin.ModelDiffMixin, models.Model):
    station_name = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    nearby_city = models.CharField(max_length=200)

    precipitation = models.DecimalField(max_digits=5, decimal_places=2)
    # 

   def is_float_changed (self,v1, v2):
        ''' Compare two floating values to just two digit precision
        Override Default precision is 5 digits
        '''
        return abs (round (v1 - v2, 2)) > 0.01

The class that loads the file has these methods:

class UpdateWeather (object)
    # other methods omitted

    def update_stations (self, filename):
        # read all existing data 
        all_stations = models.Station.objects.all()
        self._existing_stations = {}

        # insert into a collection for referencing while we check if data exists
        for stn in all_stations.iterator():
            self._existing_stations[stn.id] = stn

        # read the file. result is array of objects in known column order
        data = read_tabbed_file(filename)

        # iterate rows from file and insert or update where needed
        for rownum in range(sh.nrows):
            self._update_row(sh.row(rownum));

        # now anything remaining in the collection is no longer active
        # since it was not found in the newest file
        # for now, delete that record
        # there should never be any of these if the file was created properly
        for stn in self._existing_stations.values():
            stn.delete()
            self._num_deleted = self._num_deleted+1


    def _update_row (self, rowdata):
        stnid = int(rowdata[0].value) 
        name = rowdata[1].value.strip()

        # skip the blank names where data source has ids with no data today
        if len(name) < 1:
            return

        # fetch rest of fields and do sanity test
        nearby_city = rowdata[2].value.strip()
        precip = rowdata[3].value

        if stnid in self._existing_stations:
            stn = self._existing_stations[stnid]
            del self._existing_stations[stnid]
            is_update = True;
        else:
            stn = models.Station()
            is_update = False;

        # object is new or old, don't care here            
        stn.id = stnid
        stn.station_name = name;
        stn.nearby_city = nearby_city
        stn.precipitation = precip

        # many other fields updated from the file 

        if is_update == True:

            # we use a model mixin to simplify detection of changes
            # at the cost of extra memory to store the objects            
            if stn.has_changed == True:
                self._num_updated = self._num_updated + 1;
                stn.save();
        else:
            self._num_created = self._num_created + 1;
            stn.save()