How to store a dictionary on a Django Model

Question

I need to store some data in a Django model. These data are not equal to

I thought about subclassing the model, but I’m trying to keep the application flexible. If I use subclasses, I’ll need to create a whole class each time I need a new kind of object, and that’s no good. I’ll also end up with a lot of subclasses only to store a pair of extra fields.

I really feel that a dictionary would be the best approach, but there’s nothing in the Django documentation about storing a dictionary in a Django model.

Any clues?

all instances of the model.

Answer 1

Hello @kartik,

If you don't need to query by any of this extra data, then you can store it as a serialized dictionary. Use repr to turn the dictionary into a string, and eval to turn the string back into a dictionary. Take care with eval that there's no user data in the dictionary, or use a safe_eval implementation.

For example, in the create and update methods of your views, you can add:

if isinstance(request.data, dict) == False:
    req_data = request.data.dict().copy()
else:
    req_data = request.data.copy()

dict_key = 'request_parameter_that_has_a_dict_inside'
if dict_key in req_data.keys() and isinstance(req_data[dict_key], dict):
    req_data[dict_key] = repr(req_data[dict_key])

Hope it helps!