Oracle fixed length CHAR field in Django^edit

01 May 2016

4 mins

When you’re developing the Django app based on the legacy Oracle database you’ll find this type of model

from django.db import models

class Product(models.Model):
    type_product = models.CharField(max_length=3)
    code_product = models.CharField(max_length=15)
    price = models.DecimalField(max_digits=8, decimal_places=2)

    class Meta:
        unique_together = (('type_product', 'code_product'),)

where the primary key is made by the tuple ('type_product', 'code_product'). The field code_product usually is filled by some characters and the rest is padded with spaces to respect the Oracle’s CHAR(15) type. You may wish to trim those spaces in your REST web-service, but still wish to filter lists and to join on foreign keys.

Here is my hack of this problem, the CharFieldPadding class register the new character field in Django that call handy ljust function to pad the string with spaces and respect the max_length parameter.

from django.db import models

class CharFieldPadding(models.CharField):
    def __init__(self, max_length, *args, **kwargs):
        kwargs['max_length'] = max_length

        super(CharFieldPadding, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)

    def get_prep_value(self, value):
        return value.ljust(self.max_length, ' ')


class Product(models.Model):
    type_product = models.CharField(max_length=3)
    code_product = CharFieldPadding(max_length=15)
    price = models.DecimalField(max_digits=8, decimal_places=2)

    class Meta:
        unique_together = (('type_product', 'code_product'),)