Detect if a model has changed before calling save in Django

Question

I have a database model that is being updated based on changes in remote data (via an HTML scraper).

I want to maintain a field called changed - a times

Answer 1

You might try computing a checksum of the record values when you save them. Then when you read it later, recompute the checksum and see if it has changed. Perhaps the crc32 function in the Python zlib standard module. (I'm not sure what kind of performance this would have. So you may want to investigate that.)