How do i auto-populate fields in django?

Question

I have a model Question with a field called userid, before one ask a question, one needs to login, i want when saving to capture the user ID of the currently logged-in user and assign it to the userid of the Question model.

Please note am not showing the userid on my form i.e. in the Question model i have declared the userid as follows;

class Question(models.Model): ... userid=models.ForeignKey(User, editable=false) ...

How do i assign logged-in user ID to the Question model userid?

Answer 1

Your code may look like this:

from django.contrib.auth.decorators import login_required

class QuestionForm(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
         model = Question

@login_required
def ask(request):
    form = QuestionForm(request.POST)

    if form.is_valid():
        question = form.save(False)
        question.userid = request.user
        question.save()

    #...

Answer 2

This blog entry (by James Bennett) might prove useful for you as well...it lays out a way to do almost exactly what you require.

Answer 3

For a more recent - and likely to be updated - resource, I recommend the official Django documentation. This very example has made it's way into the ModelAdmin methods section of the ModelAdmin documentation.

If you're like me, you'll be tempted to just grab that example and run, but you might benefit from slowing down, taking a few minutes to read, and then implementing - I certainly would have...