Custom document model¶

An alternate Document model can be used to add custom behaviour and additional fields.

You need to complete the following steps in your project to do this:

Create a new document model that inherits from wagtail.documents.models.AbstractDocument. This is where you would add additional fields.
Point WAGTAILDOCS_DOCUMENT_MODEL to the new model.

Here’s an example:

# models.py
from django.db import models

from wagtail.documents.models import Document, AbstractDocument

class CustomDocument(AbstractDocument):
    # Custom field example:
    source = models.CharField(
        max_length=255,
        blank=True,
        null=True
    )

    admin_form_fields = Document.admin_form_fields + (
        # Add all custom fields names to make them appear in the form:
        'source',
    )

Then in your settings module:

# Ensure that you replace app_label with the app you placed your custom
# model in.
WAGTAILDOCS_DOCUMENT_MODEL = 'app_label.CustomDocument'

Note

Migrating from the builtin document model

When changing an existing site to use a custom document model, no documents will be copied to the new model automatically. Copying old documents to the new model would need to be done manually with a data migration.

Any templates that reference the builtin document model will still continue to work as before.

Referring to the document model¶

wagtail.documents.get_document_model()¶: Get the document model from the WAGTAILDOCS_DOCUMENT_MODEL setting. Defaults to the standard Document model if no custom model is defined.

wagtail.documents.get_document_model_string()¶: Get the dotted app.Model name for the document model as a string. Useful for developers making Wagtail plugins that need to refer to the document model, such as in foreign keys, but the model itself is not required.