How to store a dictionary on a Django Model?

Another clean and fast solution can be found here: https://github.com/bradjasper/django-jsonfield

For convenience I copied the simple instructions.

Install

pip install jsonfield

Usage

from django.db import models
from jsonfield import JSONField

class MyModel(models.Model):
    json = JSONField()

If it's really dictionary like arbitrary data you're looking for you can probably use a two-level setup with one model that's a container and another model that's key-value pairs. You'd create an instance of the container, create each of the key-value instances, and associate the set of key-value instances with the container instance. Something like:

class Dicty(models.Model):
    name      = models.CharField(max_length=50)

class KeyVal(models.Model):
    container = models.ForeignKey(Dicty, db_index=True)
    key       = models.CharField(max_length=240, db_index=True)
    value     = models.CharField(max_length=240, db_index=True)

It's not pretty, but it'll let you access/search the innards of the dictionary using the DB whereas a pickle/serialize solution will not.

If you don't need to query by any of this extra data, then you can store it as a serialized dictionary. Use repr to turn the dictionary into a string, and eval to turn the string back into a dictionary. Take care with eval that there's no user data in the dictionary, or use a safe_eval implementation.

For example, in the create and update methods of your views, you can add:

if isinstance(request.data, dict) == False:
    req_data = request.data.dict().copy()
else:
    req_data = request.data.copy()

dict_key = 'request_parameter_that_has_a_dict_inside'
if dict_key in req_data.keys() and isinstance(req_data[dict_key], dict):
    req_data[dict_key] = repr(req_data[dict_key])

I came to this post by google's 4rth result to "django store object"

A little bit late, but django-picklefield looks like good solution to me.

Example from doc:

To use, just define a field in your model:

>>> from picklefield.fields import PickledObjectField
>>> class SomeObject(models.Model):
>>>     args = PickledObjectField()

and assign whatever you like (as long as it's picklable) to the field:

>>> obj = SomeObject()
>>> obj.args = ['fancy', {'objects': 'inside'}]
>>> obj.save()