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Handling Duplicate Entries with Django's UniqueConstraint and Bulk Create

👀 Views: 48 đŸ’Ŧ Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-04
django bulk-create unique-constraint database Python

I'm refactoring my project and I'm prototyping a solution and This might be a silly question, but I'm working on a Django application where I'm trying to insert multiple records into a database using `bulk_create()`. I have a model with a `UniqueConstraint` on a combination of fields, and when I try to bulk create entries that include duplicates, I receive an `IntegrityError`. I'm expecting that Django would skip duplicates and insert only the unique entries, but instead, the entire bulk operation fails. Here's a simplified version of my model: ```python from django.db import models class Product(models.Model): name = models.CharField(max_length=100) sku = models.CharField(max_length=50) class Meta: constraints = [ models.UniqueConstraint(fields=['name', 'sku'], name='unique_product_name_sku') ] ``` And here's how I'm calling `bulk_create()`: ```python products = [ Product(name='Widget', sku='WGT123'), Product(name='Widget', sku='WGT123'), # Duplicate Product(name='Gadget', sku='GDT456'), ] Product.objects.bulk_create(products) ``` When I run this, I get the following behavior: ``` IntegrityError: UNIQUE constraint failed: app_product.name, app_product.sku ``` I've tried wrapping the `bulk_create()` in a try-except block to handle the behavior gracefully, but that doesn't address the scenario of skipping duplicates. Is there a way to modify the bulk operation to ignore duplicates while still leveraging the efficiency of `bulk_create()`? Or do I need to check for duplicates beforehand, which could negate the performance benefits? Any insights or workarounds would be greatly appreciated! Am I missing something obvious? I'm working on a API that needs to handle this. Any help would be greatly appreciated! I'm using Python stable in this project. Am I approaching this the right way? Is this even possible? I appreciate any insights!