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Django 4.2: Issues with Bulk Create and Auto-Generated Fields

👀 Views: 183 đŸ’Ŧ Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-21
django bulk-create models datetime Python

I'm not sure how to approach I'm having a hard time understanding I'm deploying to production and I'm stuck trying to I'm stuck on something that should probably be simple..... I'm relatively new to this, so bear with me. This might be a silly question, but I'm facing an issue with using `bulk_create` in Django 4.2 when trying to add a list of objects that contain auto-generated fields... I have a simple model defined like this: ```python from django.db import models class Product(models.Model): name = models.CharField(max_length=100) price = models.DecimalField(max_digits=10, decimal_places=2) created_at = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True) updated_at = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=True) ``` I want to add multiple products in one go to improve performance, so I decided to use `bulk_create`. Here's the code I've implemented: ```python new_products = [Product(name='Product A', price=29.99), Product(name='Product B', price=39.99)] Product.objects.bulk_create(new_products) ``` However, I'm noticing that the `created_at` field is not being populated correctly; it defaults to `None` instead of auto-generating the timestamp when the records are created. Additionally, when I query the database, it looks like the `created_at` field is entirely empty for these new entries. I've checked the official Django documentation and confirmed that `bulk_create` should indeed work with models having auto-generated fields. I also tried explicitly setting `update_fields` in the `bulk_create` call, but that doesn't seem to address the issue: ```python Product.objects.bulk_create(new_products, update_fields=['name', 'price']) ``` Could someone clarify if `bulk_create` is supposed to handle auto-generated fields in this way? Is there a workaround or best practice for ensuring that fields like `created_at` are populated when using `bulk_create`? Any insights would be greatly appreciated! Any ideas what could be causing this? For context: I'm using Python on Windows. What am I doing wrong? This is happening in both development and production on Linux. Is this even possible? I'd really appreciate any guidance on this. I'm using Python LTS in this project. I'm on Ubuntu 22.04 using the latest version of Python. Thanks in advance! I'm using Python latest in this project. I'd be grateful for any help.