Not the movie 🙂
I’m following the Django tutorial and it’s surprisingly fun! I ran into an issue that I’m going to document here for any hapless souls that come after me. To seasoned Python devs, it’s blindingly obvious but I’m a newbie.Â
In the tutorial, we’re only supposed to create 2 models (Poll and Choice) but I decided to add an extra model to my models.py file:
  class Transaction(models.Model):
    groceryitem = models.IntegerField()
    store_name = models.CharField(max_length=255)
    transaction_id = models.IntegerField(default=1)
    purchase_date = models.DateTimeField(‘date purchased’)
    def __unicode__(self):
      return self.transaction_id
After adding the Transaction model to the admin page to be edited, I was unable to view 127.0.0.1:8000/admin/poll/transaction/ and got this error message:
Exception Type: AttributeError
Exception Value: ‘long’ object has no attribute ‘encode’
When i switched to the interactive shell to check on my Transaction objects, I got this very helpful error message.
>>> Transaction.objects.all():
[…]
TypeError: coercing to Unicode: need string or buffer, long found
When I defined __unicode__ for the Transaction model, I should output a string object instead of the number. Defining __unicode__ is analogous to defining the toString() method in Java (correct me if I’m wrong). To solve y The last line of my Transaction model group of statements should have been:
return str(self.transaction_id)
Jane Talks Code 