使用字符串中的日期时间创建Django模型

Question

Given the following Django model:

from django.db import models

class TimeStamp(models.Model):
    date = models.DateField()

I was surprised to discover that I can pass in strings instead of datetime objects:

In [4]: ts = TimeStamp.objects.create(date="2001-12-31")

In [5]: ts.date
Out[5]: '2001-12-31'

In [6]: reloaded_ts = TimeStamp.objects.get(id=ts.id)

In [7]: reloaded_ts.date
Out[7]: datetime.date(2001, 12, 31)

Why does Django do this instead of erroring about types? Is there documentation for this behaviour? What time format is it expecting?

Answer 1

Yes this is expected and documented:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/settings/#date-input-formats