Unique model field in Django and case sensitivity (postgres)

Question

Consider the following situation: -

Suppose my app allows users to create the states / provinces in their country. Just for clarity, we are considering only ASCII ch

Answer 1

Alternatively you can change the default Query Set Manager to do case insensitive look-ups on the field. In trying to solve a similar problem I came across:

http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/305/

Code pasted here for convenience:

from django.db.models import Manager
from django.db.models.query import QuerySet

class CaseInsensitiveQuerySet(QuerySet):
    def _filter_or_exclude(self, mapper, *args, **kwargs):
        # 'name' is a field in your Model whose lookups you want case-insensitive by default
        if 'name' in kwargs:
            kwargs['name__iexact'] = kwargs['name']
            del kwargs['name']
        return super(CaseInsensitiveQuerySet, self)._filter_or_exclude(mapper, *args, **kwargs)

# custom manager that overrides the initial query set
class TagManager(Manager):
    def get_query_set(self):
        return CaseInsensitiveQuerySet(self.model)

# and the model itself
class Tag(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(maxlength=50, unique=True, db_index=True)

    objects = TagManager()

    def __str__(self):
        return self.name

Answer 2

Explicit steps for Mayuresh's answer:

1. in postgres do: CREATE EXTENSION citext;

2. in your models.py add:

   from django.db.models import fields
   
   class CaseInsensitiveTextField(fields.TextField):
       def db_type(self, connection):
           return "citext"
   

   reference: https://github.com/zacharyvoase/django-postgres/blob/master/django_postgres/citext.py

3. in your model use: name = CaseInsensitiveTextField(unique=True)

Answer 3

If you don't want to use a postgres-specific solution, you can create a unique index on the field with upper() to enforce uniqueness at the database level, then create a custom Field mixin that overrides get_lookup() to convert case-sensitive lookups to their case-insensitive versions. The mixin looks like this:

class CaseInsensitiveFieldMixin:
    """
    Field mixin that uses case-insensitive lookup alternatives if they exist.
    """

    LOOKUP_CONVERSIONS = {
        'exact': 'iexact',
        'contains': 'icontains',
        'startswith': 'istartswith',
        'endswith': 'iendswith',
        'regex': 'iregex',
    }

    def get_lookup(self, lookup_name):
        converted = self.LOOKUP_CONVERSIONS.get(lookup_name, lookup_name)
        return super().get_lookup(converted)

And you use it like this:

from django.db import models


class CICharField(CaseInsensitiveFieldMixin, models.CharField):
    pass


class CIEmailField(CaseInsensitiveFieldMixin, models.EmailField):
    pass


class TestModel(models.Model):
    name = CICharField(unique=True, max_length=20)
    email = CIEmailField(unique=True)

You can read more about this approach here.

Answer 4

a very simple solution:

class State(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50, unique=True)

    def clean(self):
        self.name = self.name.capitalize()

Answer 5

You could define a custom model field derived from models.CharField. This field could check for duplicate values, ignoring the case.

Custom fields documentation is here http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/custom-model-fields/

Look at http://code.djangoproject.com/browser/django/trunk/django/db/models/fields/files.py for an example of how to create a custom field by subclassing an existing field.

You could use the citext module of PostgreSQL https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/citext.html

If you use this module, the the custom field could define "db_type" as CITEXT for PostgreSQL databases.

This would lead to case insensitive comparison for unique values in the custom field.

Answer 6

Solution from suhail worked for me without the need to enable citext, pretty easy solution only a clean function and instead of capitalize I used upper(). Mayuresh's solution also works but changed the field from CharField to TextField.

class State(models.Model):

    name = models.CharField(max_length=50, unique=True)

    def clean(self):
        self.name = self.name.upper()