Scrapy: Default values for items & fields. What is the best implementation?

Question

As far as I could find out from the documentation and various discussions on the net, the ability to add default values to fields in a scrapy item has been removed.

Answer 1

figured out what the problem was. the pipeline is working (code follows for other people's reference). my problem was, that I am appending values to a field. and I wanted the default method work on one of these listvalues... chose a different way and it works. I am now implementing it with a custom setDefault processor method.

class DefaultItemPipeline(object):

def process_item(self, item, spider):
    item.setdefault('amz_VendorsShippingDurationFrom', 'default')
    item.setdefault('amz_VendorsShippingDurationTo', 'default')
    # ...
    return item