Django error. Cannot assign must be an instance

Question

I get the following error when I try to run an insert into one of my tables.

Cannot assign \"1\": \"Team.department_id\" must be a \"Department\" inst

Answer 1

You don't need to pass the department id, the instance itself is enough. The following should work just fine:

new_team = Team(
    nickname = team_name,
    employee_id = employee_id,
    department_id = Department.objects.get(password = password, department_name = department_name)
)

Just a note, don't ever name your foreign fields something_id. That something is enough. Django is meant to make things easy from the user's perspective and the _id suffix means you're thinking of the database layer. In fact, if you named your column department, django will automatically create department_id column in the database for you. The way things are, you're making django create department_id_id which is rather silly.