This is going to be a short post. I recently had to write an abstract base class for a couple of models. The problem I encountered was that I needed to call the actual model class from a method that I defined in the abstract base class. And I was stuck.

Solution¶

The solution is to use the _meta API. If you're thinking that the name _meta is private and therefore unsafe to use. It's not private. The leading underscore is there to avoid confusion with the the name Meta class of the models. So, it is safe to use.

To access the actual model class in a method in your abstract base class, you can use self._meta.model.

Here's a code example:

class MyBase(models.Model):
    ...
    def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
        if self.pk:
            instance = self._meta.model.objects.get(pk=self.pk)

        ...

    class Meta:
        abstract = True

That's it¶

I created this post because I couldn't find any resources online about this.

Hope it helps you, too.