django and executing a separate .py to manipute a database

Question

Hello, I want to execute a random .py file, say foo.py on the myproject/myapp folder by using crobjob by some periods

I have this basic model in my model.py for the app:

class Mymodel(models.Model):
    content = models.TextField()

Say I have this in my foo.py, I want to check if there is any Mymodel object that has a content field as same as mytext, if not make a new Mymodel with the mytext as content, if already existing do nothing.

<do django importings>
mytext = "something here"
if Mymodel.filter(content=mytext) == null:
    newitem = Mymodel(content=mytext)
    newitem.save()
else:
    pass

So here is my question, what django imports shall I be doing? Also how can I check if the query has no item (don't know if if Mymodel.filter(content=mytext) == null would work. Also I don't know if this is an efficient way to achieve my goal as the amount of Mymodel will be high.

Thanks

Answer 1

You have two separate questions here - it would have been better to split them out.

To run a separate script, you're best off creating a ./manage.py command. See the documentation on how to do this.

For your second question, the code you give is not valid Python, since there is no 'null' value - you mean None. However even then the code will not work, as that isn't how you write that query using the Django ORM. You want something like this:

if not MyModel.objects.filter(content=mytext).count():

which asks the database how many items there are with content=mytext, and is True if there are none.

Answer 2

You might also check out django-extensions, which has a built-in manage.py extension called "runscript" that executes any python script in your django project's context.