Save M2M “Through” Inlines in Django Admin

Question

Apparently Django's ModelAdmin/ModelForm doesn't allow you to use save_m2m() if there's an intermediate through table for a ManyToManyField.

models.py:

from django.db import models


def make_uuid():
    import uuid
    return uuid.uuid4().hex


class MyModel(models.Model):
    id = models.CharField(default=make_uuid, max_length=32, primary_key=True)
    title = models.CharField(max_length=32)
    many = models.ManyToManyField("RelatedModel", through="RelatedToMyModel")

    def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
      if not self.id:
        self.id = make_uuid()
      super(GuidPk, self).save(*args, **kwargs)


class RelatedModel(models.Model):
    field = models.CharField(max_length=32)


class RelatedToMyModel(models.Model):
    my_model = models.ForeignKey(MyModel)
    related_model = models.ForeignKey(RelatedModel)
    additional_field = models.CharField(max_length=32)

admin.py:

from django import forms
from django.contrib import admin

from .models import MyModel


class RelatedToMyModelInline(admin.TabularInline):
    model = MyModel.many.through


class MyModelAdminForm(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = MyModel


class MyModelAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    form = MyModelAdminForm
    inlines = (RelatedToMyModelInline, )


admin.site.register(MyModel, MyModelAdmin)

If I save MyModel first and then add a new related through model via the inline it works fine, but if I try to set the inline while also adding data for a new MyModel, I get the Django Admin error "Please correct the error below." with nothing highlighted below.

How can I have it save MyModel and then save the inline intermediary models after? Clearly Django can save the through model once it has saved MyModel - so I'm just looking for a hook into that. I tried overriding the form's save() method by calling save_m2m() after calling instance.save(), but apparently that doesn't work for M2Ms with a through table.

I'm using Django 1.2, but this is still an issue in 1.3.

UPDATE: Well, I made a test app like above to isolate the problem, and it appears that it works as expected, correctly saving the M2M intermediary object after saving the MyModel object... as long as I let Django automatically create the MyModel.id field when running python manage.py syncdb - once I added the GUID id field, it no longer works.

This smells more and more like a Django bug.

Answer 1

In your MyModelAdmin you might try overriding the save_formset method. This way you can choose the order in which you save.