Django: How to access original (unmodified) instance in post_save signal

Question

I want to do a data denormalization for better performance, and put a sum of votes my blog post receives inside Post model:

class Post(models.Model):
    """ Blog entry """
    author          = models.ForeignKey(User)
    title           = models.CharField(max_length=255)
    text            = models.TextField()
    rating          = models.IntegerField(default=0) # here is the sum of votes!

class Vote(models.Model):
    """ Vote for blog entry """
    post            = models.ForeignKey(Post)
    voter           = models.ForeignKey(User)
    value           = models.IntegerField()

Ofcourse, I need to keep Post.rating value actual. Nornally I would use database triggers for that, but now I've decided to make a post_save signal (to reduce database process time):

# vote was saved
@receiver(post_save, sender=Vote)
def update_post_votes(sender, instance, created, **kwargs):
    """ Update post rating """
    if created:
        instance.post.rating += instance.value
        instance.post.save()
    else:
        # if vote was updated, we need to remove the old vote value and add the new one
        # but how...?

How can I access the instance value before it was saved? In database triggers, i would have OLD and NEW predefines for this, but is there something like this in post_save signals?

UPDATE

The solution based on Mark's the answer:

# vote was saved
@receiver(pre_save, sender=Vote)
def update_post_votes_on_save(sender, instance, **kwargs):
    """ Update post rating """
    # if vote is being updated, then we must remove previous value first
    if instance.id:
        old_vote = Vote.objects.get(pk=instance.id)
        instance.post.rating -= old_vote.value
    # now adding the new vote
    instance.post.rating += instance.value
    instance.post.save()

Bimbo

Answer 1

I believe post_save is too late to retrieve the unmodified version. As the name implies the data has already been written to the db at that point. You should use pre_save instead. In that case you can retrieve the model from the db via pk: old = Vote.objects.get(pk=instance.pk) and check for differences in the current instance and the previous instance.

Ilana

Answer 2

This is not an optimal solution, but it works.

@receiver(pre_save, sender=SomeModel)
def model_pre_save(sender, instance, **kwargs):
    try:
        instance._pre_save_instance = SomeModel.objects.get(pk=instance.pk)
    except SomeModel.DoesNotExist:
        instance._pre_save_instance = instance


@receiver(signal=post_save, sender=SomeModel)
def model_post_save(sender, instance, created, **kwargs):
    pre_save_instance = instance._pre_save_instance
    post_save_instance = instance 

Raimondo

Why it is not optimal? – Corbin

@CharanjitSingh It works, but I'm not sure this is the exact right way to do it. – Raimondo

Yeah, As Far As I believe, it might be optimal, but less predictive, as the old instance could be deleted from the memory, I am not sure about the signals workflow of django, but that could be an issue. – Corbin

I would only suggest that instead of saving the whole instance, just store the subset of data that you need for comparison in the post_save. – Melbamelborn

Answer 3

You can use the FieldTracker from django-model-utils: https://django-model-utils.readthedocs.io/en/latest/utilities.html#field-tracker

Cristycriswell