Support creating `models.TextChoices` directly from existing `Enum` classes

[rapsealk]

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow Django's Code of Conduct

Feature Description

This issue proposes adding a helper method to models.TextChoices that allows creating a TextChoices class directly from an existing Python Enum (or StrEnum) class.

This would help developers who already define enums elsewhere in their codebase to reuse them easily within Django models, improving code consistency and reducing duplication.

Example

If this helper method were added to models.TextChoices:

class TextChoices(Choices, StrEnum):
    """Class for creating enumerated string choices."""

    ...

    @classmethod
    def from_enum(cls, enum_cls, name=None):
        """Create a TextChoices class from an existing Enum class."""
        attrs = [(member.name, member.value) for member in enum_cls]
        return cls(name or enum_cls.__name__, attrs)

Then developers could create TextChoices more easily:

from .types import ArticleStatus  # an existing Enum class

class Article(models.Model):
    status = models.CharField(
        choices=models.TextChoices.from_enum(ArticleStatus),
    )

This approach would make integrating existing enums into Django models more straightforward and DRY.

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

Refs

• https://github.com/rapsealk/django/blob/f93becd062987b457b4aafa7dbf10bdf842888c2/django/db/models/enums.py#L81-L85
• https://forum.djangoproject.com/t/how-can-i-directly-create-a-models-textchoices-from-an-existing-enum-class/43376

Problem

There is no existing issue or bug — this proposal simply suggests adding a convenience helper method to improve usability.

Request or proposal

proposal

Additional Details

No response

Implementation Suggestions

No response

[github-actions]

Thank you rapsealk for sharing your idea! We have a lot of them so please be patient. You can see the current queue here.

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[nanuxbe]

I am not sure I fully understand what your goal is, but if what you want is to be able to re-use existing Enums as choices for django fields, I would suggest checking out django-enum . It provides an EnumField  that should accept most types of Enum and sounds exactly like what you are trying to achieve.

If your goal is to specifically transform Enums for TextChoices then, this is not going to work. Is there a reason behind this exact format? I am not sure I would see any advantage there but it might be that there something obvious I am missing?

If this is what you are after though, I would not be against the suggestion of adding a link to django-enum to the documentation.

[rapsealk]

@nanuxbe Thanks for the feedback! I was aiming to use the same Enum classes for both ORM models and Pydantic validation, and I got a bit tired of the boilerplate needed to make that work. That’s what made me curious whether Django might support this natively.
The django-enum package you suggested looks like a perfect fit for this use case, but I’ll stick with my current snippet for now since it already meets my needs.