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Endless Recursive Calls with Django Signals when Saving Related Models - Need guide Debugging

πŸ‘€ Views: 0 πŸ’¬ Answers: 1 πŸ“… Created: 2025-06-28
django signals models database Python

I've been struggling with this for a few days now and could really use some help. I'm refactoring my project and Could someone explain I've spent hours debugging this and I'm stuck on something that should probably be simple..... I'm having trouble with Django signals that are causing infinite recursive calls when I save a related model. I'm using Django 4.0 and I have two models, `Author` and `Book`, where each book references an author. The question arises when I trigger a `post_save` signal on the `Book` model to update an author's book count. Here’s a basic outline of my models and signals: ```python from django.db import models from django.db.models.signals import post_save from django.dispatch import receiver class Author(models.Model): name = models.CharField(max_length=100) book_count = models.IntegerField(default=0) class Book(models.Model): title = models.CharField(max_length=100) author = models.ForeignKey(Author, on_delete=models.CASCADE) @receiver(post_save, sender=Book) def update_author_book_count(sender, instance, created, **kwargs): if created: instance.author.book_count += 1 instance.author.save() ``` When I create a new `Book` instance, the signal is triggered, which updates the `author.book_count` and saves the author. However, this seems to trigger the `post_save` signal again, resulting in an endless loop. I've tried checking if the book already exists before updating the count, but it doesn't seem to resolve the scenario. I've also looked into disabling the signal temporarily during the save operation, but I’m not sure how to implement that cleanly. Is there a proper way to prevent this recursive call when saving the related model, or should I be using a different approach altogether? Any guidance or examples would be greatly appreciated! I'm working on a API that needs to handle this. Thanks in advance! My development environment is Linux. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Is this even possible? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Has anyone else encountered this? I'm working in a macOS environment. Thanks for your help in advance!