CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythondjango
corycorycory
corycorycory

Reputation: 1656

Best way to create a more complex model autofield in django?

I would like to have a field in my model that auto creates a unique primary key for each record.

I've been using:

models.AutoField(primary_key=True)

But this generates simple integer incremented ID's.

What I'd really like is some sort of random 16 digit alphanumeric primary key that is generated automatically and guaranteed to be unique.

What is the best way to implement this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 955

Answers (2)

tcathcart
tcathcart

Reputation: 54

egreene's answer is sufficient, but if you'd like to have more control over your models' UUIDs you can define an abstract base class that automatically assigns a unique UUID using Python's built-in function.

import uuid
from django.db import models

def make_uuid():
   """Return UUID4 string."""
   return str(uuid4())

class UUIDModel(models.Model):

   uuid = models.CharField(
      editable=False, max_length=36, db_index=True, 
      unique=True, default=make_uuid
   )

   class Meta:
      abstract = True

class RealModel(UUIDModel):

   name = models.CharField(max_length=36)

   def do_something(self):
      pass

The UUIDModel abstract base class could also easily be used as an ingredient in other mix-in abstract classes, letting you mix and match different attributes when making new models.

Upvotes: 2

egreene
egreene

Reputation: 377

You want to create a UUID field. The extension here django-uuidfield, https://github.com/dcramer/django-uuidfield should work.

After installing with pip install django-uuidfield, you can add the field like so:

from uuidfield import UUIDField

class MyModel(models.Model):
    uuid = UUIDField(auto=True)

Disclaimer: the code is from the github README.

Upvotes: 2

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