How can you create a non-empty CharField in Django?

Question

I have a simple model which looks like this:

class Group(models.Model):     name = models.CharField(max_length = 100, blank=False) 

I would expect this to throw an integrity error, but it does not:

group = Group() # name is an empty string here group.save() 

How can I make sure that the name variable is set to something non-empty? I.e to make the database reject any attempts to save an empty string?

Answer 1

another option that doesn't require you to manually call clean is to use this:

name = models.CharField(max_length=100, blank=False, default=None) 

• blank will prevent an empty string to be provided in the admin or using a form or serializer (most cases). However as pointed out in the comments, this unfortunately does not prevent things like model.name = "" (manually setting blank string)
• default=None will set name to None when using something like group = Group(), thus raising an exception when calling save