When saving, how can you check if a field has changed?

Question

In my model I have :

class Alias(MyBaseModel):
    remote_image = models.URLField(max_length=500, null=True, help_text=\"A URL that is downloaded and cached          


        

Answer 1

A modification to @ivanperelivskiy's answer:

@property
def _dict(self):
    ret = {}
    for field in self._meta.get_fields():
        if isinstance(field, ForeignObjectRel):
            # foreign objects might not have corresponding objects in the database.
            if hasattr(self, field.get_accessor_name()):
                ret[field.get_accessor_name()] = getattr(self, field.get_accessor_name())
            else:
                ret[field.get_accessor_name()] = None
        else:
            ret[field.attname] = getattr(self, field.attname)
    return ret

This uses django 1.10's public method get_fields instead. This makes the code more future proof, but more importantly also includes foreign keys and fields where editable=False.

For reference, here is the implementation of .fields

@cached_property
def fields(self):
    """
    Returns a list of all forward fields on the model and its parents,
    excluding ManyToManyFields.

    Private API intended only to be used by Django itself; get_fields()
    combined with filtering of field properties is the public API for
    obtaining this field list.
    """
    # For legacy reasons, the fields property should only contain forward
    # fields that are not private or with a m2m cardinality. Therefore we
    # pass these three filters as filters to the generator.
    # The third lambda is a longwinded way of checking f.related_model - we don't
    # use that property directly because related_model is a cached property,
    # and all the models may not have been loaded yet; we don't want to cache
    # the string reference to the related_model.
    def is_not_an_m2m_field(f):
        return not (f.is_relation and f.many_to_many)

    def is_not_a_generic_relation(f):
        return not (f.is_relation and f.one_to_many)

    def is_not_a_generic_foreign_key(f):
        return not (
            f.is_relation and f.many_to_one and not (hasattr(f.remote_field, 'model') and f.remote_field.model)
        )

    return make_immutable_fields_list(
        "fields",
        (f for f in self._get_fields(reverse=False)
         if is_not_an_m2m_field(f) and is_not_a_generic_relation(f) and is_not_a_generic_foreign_key(f))
    )