How can I overload the assignment of a class member?

Question

I am writing a Player model class in Python with Django, and I've ran into a small problem with the password member. I'd like the password to be automatically hashed upon assignment, but I can't find anything about overloading the assignment operator or anything. Is there any way I can overload the assignment of password so as to automatically do hashlib.md5(password).hexdigest() on it?

from django.db import models

class Player(models.Model):
 name = models.CharField(max_length=30,unique=True)
 password = models.CharField(max_length=32)
 email = models.EmailField()

Answer 1

Can't you use properties and override setter for the field?

Citing from django documentation:

from django.db import models

class Person(models.Model):
    first_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)
    last_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)

    def _get_full_name(self):
        return "%s %s" % (self.first_name, self.last_name)

    def _set_full_name(self, combined_name):
        self.first_name, self.last_name = combined_name.split(' ', 1)

    full_name = property(_get_full_name)

    full_name_2 = property(_get_full_name, _set_full_name)

Answer 2

You can use the HashedProperty class that I created for SQLAlchemy. You can use with Django like this:

class Player(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=30,unique=True)
    password_hash = models.CharField(max_length=32)
    password_salt = models.CharField(max_length=32)
    password = HashedProperty('password_hash', 'password_salt',
                   hashfunc=salted_hexdigest(hashlib.md5),
                   saltfunc=random_string(32))
    email = models.EmailField()