Can a model manager access its models' Meta attribute (`Meta.unique_together`)?

Question

Here's my attempt at a generalized natural key model manager. It's like the docs except it tries (unsuccessfully) to determine the natural key field names from the Meta.unique_together attribute.

class NaturalKeyModelManager(Manager):

    def get_by_natural_key(self, *args):
        field_dict = {}
        for i, k in enumerate(self.model.Meta.unique_together[0]):
            field_dict[k] = args[i]
        return self.get(**field_dict)

If I insert a debug print just before the for loop like this:

print dir(self.model.Meta)

it doesn't list the unqiue_together attribute at all:

['__doc__', '__module__', 'abstract']

The 'abstract' bit worried me, but another debug print shows that the model I'm trying manage with natural keys is not abstract:

>>> print self.model.Meta.abstract
False

I am mixing in a lot of abstract base classes. Could that be the problem?

class MixedModel(NamedModel, TimeStampedModel, VersionedModel, Model):
    objects = NaturalKeyModelManager()

    class Meta:
        unique_together = (('name', 'version',),)

For completeness here's one of the mixins:

class TimeStampedModel(Model):
    created = DateTimeField(_("Created"),     auto_now_add=True, null=True, editable=False)
    updated = DateTimeField(_("Updated"),     auto_now=True,     null=True, editable=True)

    class Meta:
        abstract = True

The hard-coded model manager works just fine:

class MixedModelManager(Manager):
    def get_by_natural_key(self, name, version):
        return self.get(name=name, version=version)

Answer 1

In order to get the actual options passed to meta, you should use self.model._meta rather than self.model.Meta