[Based on snippet #513 by obeattie.](http://www.djangosnippets.org/snippets/513/)
**Update 10/10/09:** [Further development is now occurring on GitHub, thanks to Shrubbery Software.](http://github.com/shrubberysoft/django-picklefield)
Incredibly useful for storing just about anything in the database (provided it is Pickle-able, of course) when there isn't a 'proper' field for the job.
`PickledObjectField` is database-agnostic, and should work with any database backend you can throw at it. You can pass in any Python object and it will automagically be converted behind the scenes. You never have to manually pickle or unpickle anything. Also works fine when querying; supports `exact`, `in`, and `isnull` lookups. It should be noted, however, that calling `QuerySet.values()` will only return the encoded data, not the original Python object.
*Please note that this is supposed to be two files, one fields.py and one tests.py (if you don't care about the unit tests, just use fields.py).*
This PickledObjectField has a few improvements over the one in [snippet #513](http://www.djangosnippets.org/snippets/513/).
1. This one solves the `DjangoUnicodeDecodeError` problem when saving an object containing non-ASCII data by base64 encoding the pickled output stream. This ensures that all stored data is ASCII, eliminating the problem.
2. `PickledObjectField` will now optionally use `zlib` to compress (and uncompress) pickled objects on the fly. This can be set per-field using the keyword argument "compress=True". For most items this is probably **not** worth the small performance penalty, but for Models with larger objects, it can be a real space saver.
3. You can also now specify the pickle protocol per-field, using the protocol keyword argument. The default of `2` should always work, unless you are trying to access the data from outside of the Django ORM.
4. Worked around a rare issue when using the `cPickle` and performing lookups of complex data types. In short, `cPickle` would sometimes output different streams for the same object depending on how it was referenced. This of course could cause lookups for complex objects to fail, even when a matching object exists. See the docstrings and tests for more information.
5. You can now use the `isnull` lookup and have it function as expected. A consequence of this is that by default, `PickledObjectField` has `null=True` set (you can of course pass `null=False` if you want to change that). If `null=False` is set (the default for fields), then you wouldn't be able to store a Python `None` value, since `None` values aren't pickled or encoded (this in turn is what makes the `isnull` lookup possible).
6. You can now pass in an object as the default argument for the field without it being converted to a unicode string first. If you pass in a callable though, the field will still call it. It will *not* try to pickle and encode it.
7. You can manually import `dbsafe_encode` and `dbsafe_decode` from fields.py if you want to encode and decode objects yourself. This is mostly useful for decoding values returned from calling `QuerySet.values()`, which are still encoded strings.
The tests have been updated to match the added features, but if you find any bugs, please post them in the comments. My goal is to make this an error-proof implementation.
**Note:** If you are trying to store other django models in the `PickledObjectField`, please see the comments for a discussion on the problems associated with doing that. The easy solution is to put django models into a list or tuple before assigning them to the `PickledObjectField`.
**Update 9/2/09:** Fixed the `value_to_string` method so that serialization should now work as expected. Also added `deepcopy` back into `dbsafe_encode`, fixing #4 above, since `deepcopy` had somehow managed to remove itself. This means that lookups should once again work as expected in **all** situations. Also made the field `editable=False` by default (which I swear I already did once before!) since it is never a good idea to have a `PickledObjectField` be user editable.
- model
- db
- orm
- database
- pickle
- object
- field
- type
- pickled
- store