Mastering Django: Core

Making fields optional

After you play around with the admin site for a while, you'll probably notice a limitation-the edit forms require every field to be filled out, whereas in many cases you'd want certain fields to be optional. Let's say, for example, that we want our Author model's email field to be optional-that is, a blank string should be allowed. In the real world, you might not have an e-mail address on file for every author.

To specify that the email field is optional, edit the Author model (which, as you'll recall from Chapter 4, Models, lives in mysite/books/models.py). Simply add blank=True to the email field, like so:

class Author(models.Model): first_name = models.CharField(max_length=30) last_name = models.CharField(max_length=40) ...