Validating Unique Fields in Django - django

Question

I don't know if I'm approaching the problem in the right way. The intended outcome is to have a form that displays only name and description. Once the user submits the form I want to add the current user as owner and check if there's already an entry that has the same name and user. If there is, I want to return the form with errors. If not, I want to save Status.
My model:
class Status(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
description = models.TextField(blank=True)
owner = models.ForeignKey(User)
active = models.BooleanField(default=True)
class Meta:
unique_together = ('name','owner')
My View:
def settings_status(request):
status_form = StatusForm()
if request.method == 'POST':
status_form = StatusForm(request.POST)
if status_form.is_valid():
new_status = Status()
new_status.name = status_form.cleaned_data['name']
new_status.description = status_form.cleaned_data['description']
new_status.owner = request.user
new_status.save()
return render_to_response('base/settings_status.html',{
'status_form' : status_form,
}, context_instance=RequestContext(request))
I have tried numerous things, but I keep running into the problem that if I add owner to the object separately then it isn't available to the model's clean function and therefore can't be used to check if name and owner are unique.

Answer 1

Several ways to do this:
for example, passing in the user (owner) to the form:
forms.py:
class StatusForm(forms.Form):
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
self.user = kwargs.pop('user','')
super(StatusForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
self.fields['name'] = forms.CharField(label='Name')
self.fields['description'] = CharField(label='Description', widget=forms.Textarea)
def clean(self):
cleaned_data = self.cleaned_data
name = cleaned_data.get('name')
if Status.objects.filter(name=name, owner=self.user).exists():
self._errors['name'] self.error_class(['Status with this name exists'])
return cleaned_data
views.py:
def settings_status(request):
if request.method == 'POST':
status_form = StatusForm(request.POST, user=request.user)
if status_form.is_valid():
new_status = Status()
new_status.name = status_form.cleaned_data['name']
new_status.description = status_form.cleaned_data['description']
new_status.owner = request.user
new_status.save()
else:
status_form = StatusForm(user=request.user)
context = {'status_form':status_form,}
return render_to_response('base/settings_status.html', context,
context_instance=RequestContext(request))
Also look at setting initial data depending on your form setup and consider using a ModelForm.