How to work with unsaved many-to-many relations in django?

Question

I have a couple of models in django which are connected many-to-many. I want to create instances of these models in memory, present them to the user (via custom met

Answer 1

I think that using django forms may be the answer, as outlined in this documentation (search for m2m...).

Edited to add some explanation for other people who might have the same problem:

say you have a model like this:

from django.db import models
from django.forms import ModelForm

class Foo(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length = 30)

class Bar(models.Model):
      foos = models.ManyToManyField(Foo)

  def __unicode__(self):
      return " ".join([x.name for x in foos])

then you cannot call unicode() on an unsaved Bar object. If you do want to print things out before they will be saved, you have to do this:

class BarForm(ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = Bar

def example():      
    f1 = Foo(name = 'sue')
    f1.save()
    f2 = foo(name = 'wendy')
    f2.save()
    bf = BarForm({'foos' : [f1.id, f2.id]})
    b = bf.save(commit = false)
    # unfortunately, unicode(b) doesn't work before it is saved properly,
    # so we need to do it this way: 
    if(not bf.is_valid()):
        print bf.errors
    else:
        for (key, value) in bf.cleaned_data.items():
            print key + " => " + str(value)

So, in this case, you have to have saved Foo objects (which you might validate before saving those, using their own form), and before saving the models with many to many keys, you can validate those as well. All without the need to save data too early and mess up the database or dealing with transactions...