When you’re developing a Django app based on a 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 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 for this problem: the CharFieldPadding class registers a new character field in Django that calls the 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'),)

Everything works smoothly in Django Rest Framework and you have nice looking URLs.

Happy coding!