Duplicate Django Model Instance and All Foreign Keys Pointing to It

Question

I want to create a method on a Django model, call it model.duplicate(), that duplicates the model instance, including all the foreign keys pointing to it. I kno

Answer 1

Here is a somewhat simple-minded solution. This does not depend on any undocumented Django APIs. It assumes that you want to duplicate a single parent record, along with its child, grandchild, etc. records. You pass in a whitelist of classes that should actually be duplicated, in the form of a list of names of the one-to-many relationships on each parent object that point to its child objects. This code assumes that, given the above whitelist, the entire tree is self-contained, with no external references to worry about.

One more thing about this code: it is truly recursive, in that it calls itself for each new level of descendants.

from collections import OrderedDict

def duplicate_model_with_descendants(obj, whitelist, _new_parent_pk=None):
    kwargs = {}
    children_to_clone = OrderedDict()
    for field in obj._meta.get_fields():
        if field.name == "id":
            pass
        elif field.one_to_many:
            if field.name in whitelist:
                these_children = list(getattr(obj, field.name).all())
                if children_to_clone.has_key(field.name):
                    children_to_clone[field.name] |= these_children
                else:
                    children_to_clone[field.name] = these_children
            else:
                pass
        elif field.many_to_one:
            if _new_parent_pk:
                kwargs[field.name + '_id'] = _new_parent_pk
        elif field.concrete:
            kwargs[field.name] = getattr(obj, field.name)
        else:
            pass
    new_instance = obj.__class__(**kwargs)
    new_instance.save()
    new_instance_pk = new_instance.pk
    for ky in children_to_clone.keys():
        child_collection = getattr(new_instance, ky)
        for child in children_to_clone[ky]:
            child_collection.add(duplicate_model_with_descendants(child, whitelist=whitelist, _new_parent_pk=new_instance_pk))
    return new_instance

Example usage:

from django.db import models

class Book(models.Model)

class Chapter(models.Model)
    book = models.ForeignKey(Book, related_name='chapters')

class Page(models.Model)
    chapter = models.ForeignKey(Chapter, related_name='pages')

WHITELIST = ['books', 'chapters', 'pages']
original_record = models.Book.objects.get(pk=1)
duplicate_record = duplicate_model_with_descendants(original_record, WHITELIST)