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

Very late answer, but wagtail's team has made a separate Django extension called django-modelcluster. It's what powers their CMS's draft previews.

It allows you to do something like this (from their README):

from modelcluster.models import ClusterableModel
from modelcluster.fields import ParentalKey

class Band(ClusterableModel):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=255)

class BandMember(models.Model):
    band = ParentalKey('Band', related_name='members')
    name = models.CharField(max_length=255)

Then the models can be used like so:

beatles = Band(name='The Beatles')
beatles.members = [
    BandMember(name='John Lennon'),
    BandMember(name='Paul McCartney'),
]

Here, ParentalKey is the replacement for Django's ForeignKey. Similarly, they have ParentalManyToManyField to replace Django's ManyToManyField.