Unique model field in Django and case sensitivity (postgres)

Question

Consider the following situation: -

Suppose my app allows users to create the states / provinces in their country. Just for clarity, we are considering only ASCII ch

Answer 1

If you don't want to use a postgres-specific solution, you can create a unique index on the field with upper() to enforce uniqueness at the database level, then create a custom Field mixin that overrides get_lookup() to convert case-sensitive lookups to their case-insensitive versions. The mixin looks like this:

class CaseInsensitiveFieldMixin:
    """
    Field mixin that uses case-insensitive lookup alternatives if they exist.
    """

    LOOKUP_CONVERSIONS = {
        'exact': 'iexact',
        'contains': 'icontains',
        'startswith': 'istartswith',
        'endswith': 'iendswith',
        'regex': 'iregex',
    }

    def get_lookup(self, lookup_name):
        converted = self.LOOKUP_CONVERSIONS.get(lookup_name, lookup_name)
        return super().get_lookup(converted)

And you use it like this:

from django.db import models


class CICharField(CaseInsensitiveFieldMixin, models.CharField):
    pass


class CIEmailField(CaseInsensitiveFieldMixin, models.EmailField):
    pass


class TestModel(models.Model):
    name = CICharField(unique=True, max_length=20)
    email = CIEmailField(unique=True)

You can read more about this approach here.