Best practice: prepopulate SlugField in Django (without Admin module)

Question

In the early days of Django it was possible to prepopulate a SlugField within the Model.

In the Admin module i would use

prepopulated_fields = {'slug':('title',),}

I found a snippet that handles it Unique Slugify but I doubt that it is the best way.

So what would be the best practise to autogenerate a SlugField without using the Admin module?

Id like to use a ModelForm to integrade the form in the frontpage, which should autogenerate a unique slug for the URL.

Answer 1

This is just cut and paste from one of my older (as in less well coded) models. It should show you an idea, with just a little polish, should work.

from django.template.defaultfilters import slugify
def get_nickname(self):
    nick = self.name
    vowels = ('a','e','i','o','u')
    first_letter = nick[:1]
    nick = nick[1:]

    for vowel in vowels: nick = nick.replace(vowel,'')
    nick = first_letter + nick
    if len(nick) > 8:
        nick = nick[:7]
    return nick

def save(self, force_insert=False, force_update=False, using=None):
    if not self.nickname:
        self.nickname = self.get_nickname() if len(self.name)>8 else self.name
    self.slug = slugify(self.nickname)
    slug_test = SomeModel.objects.filter(slug=self.slug, id=self.id) # corrected to use a generic model name
    if slug_test:
        count = slug_test.count
        self.slug = "{}{}".format(self.slug[:len(self.slug)-1], count)

    super(SomeModel, self).save()

UPDATE: tighter code for the get_nick method ...

>>> name = 'alabama'
>>> vowels = {'a', 'e', 'i', 'o', 'u'}
>>> nick = name[0] + ''.join(l for l in name[1:] if l not in vowels)
>>> nick
'albm'

FWIW: I just updated my model, eliminating the get_nickname method, and adding a simple lambda to the top of the save method:

vowels = {'a','e','i','o','u'}
create_nick = lambda name: name[0] + ''.join(l for l in name[1:] if l not in vowels)[:7]
if not self.nickname:
    self.nickname = create_nick(self.name) if len(self.name)>8 else self.name
...