SlugField — Django Models

Michael Zippo

Slug — it is essentially a short label for something, containing only letters, numbers, underscores, or hyphens. They are commonly used in URLs. For example, in a typical blog post URL:

 https://python.engineering/add-the-slug-field-inside-django-model/amp/

Here the last add-the-slug-field-inside-django-model is a slug.

SlugField:

SlugField in Django is like CharField where you also you can specify the max_length attribute. If max_length is not specified, Django will use the default length of 50. This also assumes that Field.db_index is set to True . It is often useful to automatically prefill a SlugField based on a different value. For validation use validate_slug or validate_unicode_slug. ,

Syntax

 field_name = models.SlugField (max_length = 200,  ** options )

SlugField has the following optional arguments:

 SlugField.max_length

The maximum length (in characters) of the field. Maximum max_length applies at the database level and when validating Django using MaxLengthValidator .

 SlugField.allow_unicode

If True, the field accepts Unicode letters in addition to ASCII letters. Default False.

Django SlugField Model Explanation

Illustration of a SlugField using an example. Consider a project named pythonengineering that has an application named geeks .

Refer to the following articles to check how to create a project and an app in Django.

How to Create a Basic Project using MVT in Django?

How to Create an App in Django?

Enter the following code into the models.py file of the geeks application.

from django.db import models

from django.db.models import Model

# Create your models here.

class GeeksModel (Model):

geeks_field = models.SlugField (max_length = 200 )

Add the geek app to INSTALLED_APPS

       # App definition  
   
   INSTALLED_APPS   =   [
    ’ django.contrib.admin’  , 
   ’django.contrib.auth’  , 
   ’django.contrib.contenttypes’  ,  
   ’django.contrib.sessions’  ,  
   ’django.contrib.messages’  ,  
   ’django.contrib.staticfiles’  ,  
   ’geeks’  ,  
  ]

Now when we run makemigrations from the terminal,

  Python manage.py makemigrations 
  A new folder named migrations will be created in the  geeks  directory with a file named  0001_initial. py  
  
  
 
       # Generated by Django 2.2.5 at 2019-09-25 06:00  
   
   from   django.db   import   migrations, models 
   
   class   Migration (migrations.Migration): 
   
   initial   =   True  
    
     dependencies   =   [ 
  ] 
   
   operations   =   [
   migrations.CreateModel ( 
   name   =   ’ GeeksModel’  , 
   fields   =   [
   (  ’id’  , 
   models.AutoField (
     auto_created   =   True  , 
     primary_key   =   True   , 
   serialize   =   False  , 
   verbose_name   =   ’ID’  
    )), 
     (  ’geeks_field’  , 
     model s.SlugField (
   max_length   =   200  , 
  )), 
  ],  
  ), 
  ]

Now run,

 Python manage.py migrate

Thus, the geeks_field SlugField is generated when migrations are run in the project.

How to use SlugField?

SlugField is used to store mostly URL paths after a specific URL. To learn more about how to properly add a SlugField to your Django Project, refer to this article —

# import the model
# from the geek app

from geeks.models import GeeksModel

# instantiate
# GeeksModel

geek_object = GeeksModel. objects.create (geeks_field = "")

geek_object.save ()

Now let’s check it out on administrator a running server. We have created a GeeksModel instance.

Field options

Field options — they are arguments given to each field to apply some constraint or to convey a particular characteristic to a particular field. For example, adding the null = True argument to the SlugField will allow it to store empty values for that table in a relational database.
Here are the field options and attributes that SlugField can use.

Field Options	Description
Null	If True , Django will store empty values as NULL in the database. Default is False.
Blank	If True , the field is allowed to be blank ... Default is False.
Choices	An iterable (eg, a list or tuple) of 2-tuples to use as choices for this field.
Default	The default value for the field. This can be a value or a callable object. If callable it will be called every time a new object is created.
help_text	Extra “help” text to be displayed with the form widget. It’s useful for documentation even if your field isn’t used on a form.
primary_key	If True, this field is the primary key for the model .
Unique	If True, this field must be unique throughout the table.

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