Writing a __init__ function to be used in django model

I'm trying to write an __init__ function for one of my models so that I can create an object by doing:

p = User('name','email')

When I write the model, I have:

def __init__(self, name, email, house_id, password):
    models.Model.__init__(self)
    self.name = name
    self.email = email

This works and I can save the object to the database, but when I do User.objects.all(), it doesn't pull anything up unless I take out my __init__ function. Any ideas?

Relying on Django's built-in functionality and passing named parameters would be the simplest way to go.

p = User(name="Fred", email="[email protected]")

But if you're set on saving some keystrokes, I'd suggest adding a static convenience method to the class instead of messing with the initializer.

# In User class declaration
@classmethod
def create(cls, name, email):
  return cls(name=name, email=email)

# Use it
p = User.create("Fred", "[email protected]")

Django expects the signature of a model's constructor to be (self, *args, **kwargs), or some reasonable facsimile. Your changing the signature to something completely incompatible has broken it.

The correct answer is to avoid overriding __init__ and write a classmethod as described in the Django docs.

But this could be done like you're trying, you just need to add in *args, **kwargs to be accepted by your __init__, and pass them on to the super method call.

def __init__(self, name, email, house_id, password, *args, **kwargs):
        super(models.Model, self).__init__(self, *args, **kwargs)
        self.name = name
        self.email = email

Don't create models with args parameters. If you make a model like so:

 User('name','email')

It becomes very unreadable very quickly as most models require more than that for initialization. You could very easily end up with:

User('Bert', 'Reynolds', '[email protected]','0123456789','5432106789',....)

Another problem here is that you don't know whether 'Bert' is the first or the last name. The last two numbers could easily be a phone number and a system id. But without it being explicit you will more easily mix them up, or mix up the order if you are using identifiers. What's more is that doing it order-based will put yet another constraint on other developers who use this method and won't remember the arbitrary order of parameters.

You should prefer something like this instead:

User(
    first_name='Bert',
    last_name='Reynolds',
    email='[email protected]',
    phone='0123456789',
    system_id='5432106789',
)

If this is for tests or something like that, you can use a factory to quickly create models. The factory boy link may be useful: http://factoryboy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/