MAC Address model and form fields for Django

We use netaddr to parse and validate the MAC address. The tests aren't complete yet.

Patches welcome: http://github.com/django-macaddress/django-macaddress

For release info: https://github.com/django-macaddress/django-macaddress/releases

To specify a default dialect for presentation (and storage, see below), specify:

settings.MACADDRESS_DEFAULT_DIALECT = 'module.dialect_class'

where the specified value is a string composed of a parent python module name and the child dialect class name. For example:

settings.MACADDRESS_DEFAULT_DIALECT = 'netaddr.mac_eui48'

PS: old default of macaddress.mac_linux (uppercase and divided by ':' ) will be used by default.

If the custom dialect is defined in a package module, you will need to define the class in or import into the package's __init__.py.

To get the default dialect for your project, import and call the default_dialect function:

>>> from macaddress import default_dialect

>>> dialect = default_dialect()

This function may, optionally, be called with an netaddr.EUI class instance as its argument. If no default is defined in settings, it will return the dialect of the provided EUI object.

The format_mac function takes an EUI instance and a dialect class (netaddr.mac_eui48 or a subclass) as its arguments. The dialect class may be specified as a string in the same manner as settings.MACADDRESS_DEFAULT_DIALECT:

>>> from netaddr import EUI, mac_bare
>>> from macaddress import format_mac

>>> mac = EUI('00:12:3c:37:64:8f')
>>> format_mac(mac, mac_bare)
'00123C37648F'
>>> format_mac(mac, 'netaddr.mac_cisco')
'0012.3c37.648f'

This is an example model using MACAddressField:

from macaddress.fields import MACAddressField

class Computer(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=32)
    eth0 = MACAddressField(null=True, blank=True)
    ...

The default behavior is to store the MAC Address in the database is a BigInteger. If you would, rather, store the value as a string (to, for instance, facilitate sub-string searches), you can specify integer=False and the value will be stored as a string:

class Computer(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=32)
    eth0 = MACAddressField(blank=True, integer=False)
    ...

If you want to set unique=True on a MACAddressField that is stored as a string, you will need to set null=True and create custom clean_<foo> methods on your forms.ModelForm class for each MACAddressField that return None when the value provided is an '' (empty string):

from .models import Computer

class ComputerForm(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = Computer

    def clean_eth0(self):
        return self.cleaned_data['eth0'] or None

You should avoid changing the value of integer after running managy.py syncdb, unless you are using a schema migration solution like South or Django's built-in migrations.

• Add greater support for partial string queries when storing MACs as strings in the database.
• Add custom validator to check for duplicate MACs when mixing string and integer storage types.
• Add deprecation warning and timeline for changeover to default string storage.