Forms, Model, and updating with current user - django

Question

I think this works, but I came across a couple of things before getting it to work that I want to understand better, so the question. It also looks like other people do this a variety of ways looking at other answers on stack overflow. What I am trying to avoid is having the user to have to select his username from the pulldown when creating a new search-profile. The search profile model is:
class Search_Profile(models.Model):
author_of_profile = models.ForeignKey(settings.AUTH_USER_MODEL,on_delete=models.CASCADE,blank=True)
keyword_string = models.CharField(max_length=200)
other_stuff = models.CharField(max_length=200)
The form I ended up with was:
class Search_Profile_Form(ModelForm):
class Meta:
model = Search_Profile
fields = [ 'keyword_string', 'other_stuff']
Where I deliberately left out 'author_of_profile' so that it wouldn't be shown or need to be validated. I tried hiding it, but then the form would not save to the model because a field hadn't been entered. If I was o.k. with a pulldown I guess I could have left it in.
I didn't have any issues with the HTML while testing for completeness:
<form action="" method="POST">
{% csrf_token %}
{{ form.author_of_profile}}
{{ form.keyword_string }}
{{ form.other_stuff }}
<input type="submit" value="Save and Return to Home Page">
</form>
And the View is where I ended up treating the form and the model separated, saving the form first, then updating the model, which is where I think there might be some other way people do it.
def New_Profile(request):
if request.method=='POST':
form = Search_Profile_Form(request.POST)
if form.is_valid():
post=form.save(commit=False)
# here is where I thought I could update the author of profile field somehow with USER
# but If I include the author_of_profile field in the form it seems I can't.
post.save()
#So instead I tried to update the author_of profile directly in the model
current_profile=Search_Profile.objects.last()
current_profile.author_of_profile=request.user
current_profile.save()
return(redirect('home'))
else:
form=Search_Profile_Form()
return render(request, 'mainapp/New_Profile.html', {'form': form})
So a few questions:
For the Foreign Key in author_of_profile field, is it better to use blank=True, or null=True
I ended up using request.user rather than importing from django.contrib.auth.models import User is there any difference?
My real question though, is the above a reasonable way to get form data and update the database with that data and the user? Or am I missing some other way that is more build in?

Answer 1

post=form.save()
current_profile.author_of_profile=request.user
post.save()
return(redirect('home'))
try something like this. save the form to db then change the author again. save(commit=False) will not save the date to db immediately.