I have plenty of Hardware models which have a HardwareType with various characteristics. Like so:

# models.py
from django.db import models

class HardwareType(model.Models):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=32, unique=True)

    # some characteristics of this particular piece of hardware
    weight = models.DecimalField(max_digits=12, decimal_places=3)
    # and more [...]        

class Hardware(models.Model):

    type = models.ForeignKey(HardwareType)

    # some attributes
    is_installed = models.BooleanField()
    location_installed = models.TextField()
    # and more [...]

If I wish to add a new Hardware object, I first have to retrieve the HardwareType every time, which is not very DRY:

tmp_hd_type = HardwareType.objects.get(name='NG35001')
new_hd = Hardware.objects.create(type=tmp_hd_type, is_installed=True, ...)

Therefore, I have tried to override the HardwareManager.create() method to automatically import the type when creating new Hardware like so:

# models.py
from django.db import models

class HardwareType(model.Models):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=32, unique=True)

    # some characteristics of this particular piece of hardware
    weight = models.DecimalField(max_digits=12, decimal_places=3)
    # and more [...] 

class HardwareManager(models.Manager):
    def create(self, *args, **kwargs):
        if 'type' in kwargs and kwargs['type'] is str:
            kwargs['type'] = HardwareType.objects.get(name=kwargs['type'])
        super(HardwareManager, self).create(*args, **kwargs)       

class Hardware(models.Model):
    objects = HardwareManager()

    type = models.ForeignKey(HardwareType)

    # some attributes
    is_installed = models.BooleanField()
    location_installed = models.TextField()
    # and more [...]

# so then I should be able to do:
new_hd = Hardware.objects.create(type='ND35001', is_installed=True, ...)

But I keep getting errors and really strange behaviors from the ORM (I don't have them right here, but I can post them if needed). I've searched in the Django documentation and the SO threads, but mostly I end up on solutions where:

• the Hardware.save() method is overridden (should I get the HardwareType there ?) or,
• the manager defines a new create_something method which calls self.create().

I also started digging into the code and saw that the Manager is some special kind of QuerySet but I don't know how to continue from there. I'd really like to replace the create method in place and I can't seem to manage this. What is preventing me from doing what I want to do?

The insight from Alasdair's answer helped a lot to catch both strings and unicode strings, but what was actually missing was a return statement before the call to super(HardwareManager, self).create(*args, **kwargs) in the HardwareManager.create() method.

The errors I was getting in my tests yesterday evening (being tired when coding is not a good idea :P) were ValueError: Cannot assign None: [...] does not allow null values. because the subsequent usage of new_hd that I had create()d was None because my create() method didn't have a return. What a stupid mistake !

Final corrected code:

class HardwareManager(models.Manager):
    def create(self, *args, **kwargs):
        if 'type' in kwargs and isinstance(kwargs['type'], basestring):
            kwargs['type'] = HardwareType.objects.get(name=kwargs['type'])
        return super(HardwareManager, self).create(*args, **kwargs)