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Django ModelForm Validation Not Triggering for Nested Serializer Data

👀 Views: 647 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-08-26
django modelform validation Python

I'm collaborating on a project where I'm optimizing some code but I've been researching this but I'm working on a personal project and I'm working with an scenario with Django where I'm using a `ModelForm` to handle some nested serializer data but the validation isn't working as expected... I have a main model `Order` and a related model `OrderItem`. Here's a simplified version of my models: ```python class Order(models.Model): customer_name = models.CharField(max_length=100) class OrderItem(models.Model): order = models.ForeignKey(Order, related_name='items', on_delete=models.CASCADE) product_name = models.CharField(max_length=100) quantity = models.IntegerField() ``` I've created a `ModelForm` for `Order`, and I'm trying to validate both the `Order` and its associated `OrderItems`. Here’s how my form looks: ```python class OrderForm(forms.ModelForm): class Meta: model = Order fields = ['customer_name', 'items'] def clean_items(self): items = self.cleaned_data.get('items') # Validation logic for items if not items: raise forms.ValidationError('At least one item is required.') return items ``` I'm trying to submit data like this: ```json { "customer_name": "John Doe", "items": [ {"product_name": "Product A", "quantity": 2}, {"product_name": "Product B", "quantity": 0} ] } ``` However, the `clean_items` method never gets triggered. When I inspect `form.errors`, it doesn’t show any validation errors related to `items`. I have also tried adding a custom `clean` method in the `OrderForm`, but that didn't help either. I suspect it might be due to the way I'm handling the nested data, but I've followed the Django documentation closely. I’m using Django version 3.2.8. Can anyone guide to identify what’s going wrong here or suggest a way to properly validate nested serializer data within a `ModelForm`? My development environment is macOS. What's the best practice here? This issue appeared after updating to Python stable. I'd be grateful for any help. The stack includes Python and several other technologies. Any ideas how to fix this? Could someone point me to the right documentation?