Django 1.7 blank CharField/TextField convention

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0

Using Django's new migration framework, let's say I have the following model that already exists in the database:

class TestModel(models.Model):
    field_1 = models.CharField(max_length=20)

I now want to add a new TextField to the model, so it looks like this:

class TestModel(models.Model):
    field_1 = models.CharField(max_length=20)
    field_2 = models.TextField(blank=True)

When I try to migrate this model using python manage.py makemigrations, I get this prompt:

You are trying to add a non-nullable field 'field_2' to testmodel without a default; we can't do that (the database needs something to populate existing rows).
Please select a fix:
 1) Provide a one-off default now (will be set on all existing rows)
 2) Quit, and let me add a default in models.py

I can easily fix this by adding null=True to field_2, but Django's convention is to avoid using null on string-based fields like CharField and TextField (from http://ift.tt/1gVZ6fg). Is this a bug, or am I misunderstanding the docs?

asked 1 min ago

Jeremy Swinarton

115

Django 1.7 blank CharField/TextField convention