Django Update Model

Add Fields in the Model

To add a field to a table after it is created, open the models.py file, and make your changes:

from django.db import models

class Member(models.Model):
  firstname = models.CharField(max_length=255)
  lastname = models.CharField(max_length=255)
  phone = models.IntegerField()
  joined_date = models.DateField()

As you can see, we want to add phone and joined_date to our Member Model.

This is a change in the Model's structure, and therefore we have to make a migration to tell Django that it has to update the database:

Which, in my case, will result in a prompt, because I try to add fields that are not allowed to be null, to a table that already contains records.

As you can see, Django asks if I want to provide the fields with a specific value, or if I want to stop the migration and fix it in the model:

I will select option 2, and open the models.py file again and allow NULL values for the two new fields:

from django.db import models

class Member(models.Model):
  firstname = models.CharField(max_length=255)
  lastname = models.CharField(max_length=255)
  phone = models.IntegerField(null=True)
  joined_date = models.DateField(null=True)

And make the migration once again:

Which will result in this:

Run the migrate command:

Which will result in this output:

Insert Data

We can insert data to the two new fields with the same approach as we did in the Update Data chapter:

First, we enter the Python Shell:

Now we are in the shell, the result should be something like this:

At the bottom, after the three >>> write the following (and hit [enter] for each line):

This will insert a phone number and a date in the Member Model, at least for the first record, the four remaining records will for now be left empty. We will deal with them later in the tutorial.

Execute this command to see if the Member table got updated:

The result should look like this: