Auto-updated timestamp fields in Django bulk querysets

February 26, 2020

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In Django, fields with auto_now=True are not always updated correctly. A common practice to work around this is to override the save() method on the model, or to use a pre-save hook. However, this doesn't work when calling Model.objects.update() since save() is not called on all instances in the queryset.

A common way to fix this would be to alter the table, for example, in MySQL it may look like this:

ALTER TABLE app_model
MODIFY updated_at
DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP
ON UPDATED CURRENT_TIMESTAMP

But, this doesn't translate well into a migration and doesn't work with sqlite3 and other db backends.

I have found a simple way to fix this which will work with any database backend, so you don't need to write migrations or alter your database tables. We can do this with a simple queryset method override. All we are doing here is adding the current timestamp to the update kwargs, so all instances in the queryset will get that update!

from django.db.models import query, manager
from django.utils import timezone

class BaseQuerySet(query.QuerySet):

    def update(self, **kwargs):
        kwargs['updated_at'] = timezone.now()
        super().update(**kwargs)

class Manager(manager.BaseManager.from_queryset(BaseQuerySet)):
    pass

Then to use this, just add it to your model like so.

from django.db import models
from .manager import Manager

class BaseModel(models.Model):
    objects = Manager()
    updated_at = models.DateTimeField()

Hope this helps, and thanks for reading!