I know I can change table name per model using db_table attribute, as explained in the doc.
However, what if I want to do it globally? Let's say, I want all my table to be like:
db_table = f"table_{{model_name}}"
Is there any setting for this?
Otherwise, I guess I could use a mixin to be inherited from. However, the whole purpose of doing this is to NOT think of table naming when any developer will add a new model.
After reading this issue, It seems maintainers didn't even consider to add this feature as they did not understand the need, which is pretty clear to me :/
Any idea? Thanks.
The default database table naming goes like db_table = f"{app_label}_{model_name}" and you can rewrite them As hedde-van-der-heide suggested, by creating an abstract base model and subclassing them on your models, like
from django.db import models
class BaseModel(models.Model):
class Meta:
abstract = True
db_table = f"table_{model_name}"
class NewModel(BaseModel):
name = models.CharField(max_length=128)
def __str__(self):
return str(self.name)
I want to create 73 different django models, those models will be very similar, so in theory I would inherit from a base model class and just change the name of the Model/table.
I am aware this is not the best database structure, however I believe this unconventional structure may improve other aspects of my application. The initial point is to test this hypothesis.
How can I have django create the models, without me having to define all 73 of them?
class BaseModel(models.Model):
some_field = models.CharField(max_length=255)
some_other_field = models.CharField(max_length=255)
class Model_NR_01(BaseModel):
pass
...
class Model_NR_73(BaseModel):
pass
Also, in the sample above, I believe the BaseModel would also be created. How could I prevent that, having at the end of the migration only the 73 models mentioned? (If possible, of course).
PS.: I did searched several similar questions, couldn't find an actual answer, only warnings of how bad design it is. I am aware.
The three argument form of type can be used to create classes dynamically. The only thing you need to pass in the attributes dictionary is __module__ as using type this way to create a class will not automatically populate this attribute which is required by Django
class BaseModel(models.Model):
some_field = models.CharField(max_length=255)
some_other_field = models.CharField(max_length=255)
class Meta:
abstract = True
for i in range(1, 74):
model_name = f'Model_NR_{i:02}'
globals()[model_name] = type(model_name, (BaseModel, ), {'__module__': BaseModel.__module__})
Suppose I want to have multiple kinds of articles, all reachable on site.com/news/article-slug
(so depending on article-slug, it can be a video article, a text article, an image slider article, ...)
I have these models:
class Article(models.Model):
class Meta:
abstract = True
slug = models.SlugField(max_length=60, unique=True)
class TextArticle(Article):
content = models.TextField()
class VideoArticle(Article):
video = models.ForeignKey(Video)
But the problem is that I can create a TextArticle and a VideoArticle with the same slug.
Is there an easy way to fix it so that if there's already a VideoArticle with a specific slug, no TextArticle can be added with the same slug (and vice versa)?
If there's no easy fix:
should I go for custom form validation with database querying?
should I not make the base class abstract?
any other ideas?
Thanks in advance!
It sounds like you don't actually want an abstract class, but rather for the Article class to be the table for which all subclasses reference:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/topics/db/models/#multi-table-inheritance
I'm trying to alter an app I've created so that it is reusable. It's based around a single model which sites using the app will subclass. As it stands, my non-reusable version has the following kind of structure:
# models.py
class Document(models.Model):
contents = models.TextField()
date = models.DateTimeField()
# views.py
from .models import SiteModel
# ...
class MyView(ListView):
def some_method(self, list_of_pks):
model_vals = Document.objects.filter(pk__in = list_of_pks).values()
def perform_action(request):
obj_pk = request.POST.get('obj_pk')
obj = Document.objects.filter(pk = obj_pk)
MySignal.send(sender=Document, instance = obj)
#etc, etc
This works well enough. But my use case calls for different types of Document, one per site, that will have additional fields that aren't known in advance. Based on reading the documentation on abstract base classes, I thought the a reasonable solution would look like:
# models.py for the app
class BaseDocument(models.Model):
contents = models.TextField()
class Meta:
abstract = True
# models.py for a hypothetical site using the app
class SiteDocument(myapp.BaseDocument):
date = models.DateTimeField()
# other site-specific fields
What I don't understand is how to then reference the model in the app's views.py, forms.py, etc. I know BaseDocument.objects.all(), for example, won't return anything since it isn't connected to a database. Conversely, I can't have Document.objects.all() because Document hasn't been created yet and is specific to each site. Is an abstract base class not the correct solution, and if so, what is?
Edit:
It looks like using a OneToOneField may be best suited to my use case, although it looks like that precludes inheriting methods from the superclass and that BaseDocument.objects.all() won't list out all its children.
Alternatively, I was wondering if I could just add a get_document_model() method to my abstract base class, in the style of get_user_model()?
You can't query your abstract classes directly like that since they won't have managers, only the inherited classes. If you really must do inheritance, you can use a concrete base model and inherit from that at the cost of a join on every query.
Think long and hard about whether this is truly necessary, or if you can represent your data in a more generic way. Models make inheritance seem easy, but they're not magic. There are very real performance and complexity considerations.
It might be as easy as adding a type field to your model
class Document(models.Model):
DOCUMENT_TYPES = ['site', 'another', 'whatever']
document_type = models.CharField(choices=DOCUMENT_TYPES)
...
For more information about abstract vs concrete classes and querying, visit How to query abstract-class-based objects in Django?
I ended up going with a solution mentioned in my edit, namely creating a get_document_model() method inspired by get_user_model(). This gives me exactly the desired behavior.
# models.py in app1
from django.db import models
from django.apps import apps as django_apps
class BaseDocument(models.Model):
contents = models.TextField()
class Meta:
abstract = True
def get_document_model():
# exception handling removed for concision's sake
return django_apps.get_model(settings.DOCUMENT_MODEL)
# models.py in app2
from django.db import models
from app1.models import BaseDocument
class SiteDocument(BaseDocument):
date = models.DateTimeField()
Throughout views.py and elsewhere, I changed things that would have been of the form Document.objects.all() to BaseDocument().get_document_model().objects.all().
Is there explicit support for Single Table Inheritance in Django? Last I heard, the feature was still under development and debate.
Are there libraries/hacks I can use in the meantime to capture the basic behavior? I have a hierarchy that mixes different objects. The canonical example of a corporation structure with an Employee class, subclasses for types of employees, and a manager_id (parent_id) would be a good approximation of the problem I am solving.
In my case, I would like to represent the idea that an employee can manage other employees while being managed by a different employee. There are not separate classes for Manager and Worker, which makes this hard to spread across tables. Sub-classes would represent types of employees-programmers, accountants, sales, etc and would be independent of who supervises who (OK, I guess it's no longer a typical corporation in some respect).
Summary
Django's proxy models provide the basis for Single Table Inheritance.
However, some effort is required to make it work.
Skip to the end for a re-usable example.
Background
Martin Fowler describes Single Table Inheritance (STI) as follows:
Single Table Inheritance maps all fields of all classes of an inheritance structure into a single table.
This is precisely what Django's proxy model inheritance does.
Note, that, according to this blog post from 2010, proxy models have been around since Django 1.1.
A "normal" Django model is a concrete model, i.e. it has a dedicated table in the database.
There are two types of Django model that do not have dedicated database tables, viz. abstract models and proxy models:
Abstract models act as superclasses for concrete models. An abstract model can define fields, but it does not have a database table. The fields are only added to the database tables for its concrete subclasses.
Proxy models act as subclasses for concrete models. A proxy model cannot define new fields. Instead, it operates on the database table associated with its concrete superclass. In other words, a Django concrete model and its proxies all share a single table.
Django's proxy models provide the basis for Single Table Inheritance, viz. they allow different models to share a single table, and they allow us to define proxy-specific behavior on the Python side. However, Django's default object-relational mapping (ORM) does not provide all the behavior that would be expected, so a little customization is required. How much, that depends on your needs.
Let's build a minimal example, step by step, based on the simple data-model in the figure below:
Step 1: basic "proxy model inheritance"
Here's the content of models.py for a basic proxy inheritance implementation:
from django.db import models
class Party(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=20)
person_attribute = models.CharField(max_length=20)
organization_attribute = models.CharField(max_length=20)
class Person(Party):
class Meta:
proxy = True
class Organization(Party):
class Meta:
proxy = True
Person and Organization are two types of parties.
Only the Party model has a database table, so all the fields are defined on this model, including any fields that are specific either to Person or to Organization.
Because Party, Person, and Organization all use the Party database table, we can define a single ForeignKey field to Party, and assign instances of any of the three models to that field, as implied by the inheritance relation in the figure. Note, that, without inheritance, we would need a separate ForeignKey field for each model.
For example, suppose we define an Address model as follows:
class Address(models.Model):
party = models.ForeignKey(to=Party, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
We can then initialize an Address object using e.g. Address(party=person_instance) or Address(party=organization_instance).
So far, so good.
However, if we try to get a list of objects corresponding to a proxy model, using e.g. Person.objects.all(), we get a list of all Party objects instead, i.e. both Person objects and Organization objects. This is because the proxy models still use the model manager from the superclass (i.e. Party).
Step 2: add proxy model managers
To make sure that Person.objects.all() only returns Person objects, we need to assign a separate model manager that filters the Party queryset. To enable this filtering, we need a field that indicates which proxy model should be used for the object.
To be clear: creating a Person object implies adding a row to the Party table. The same goes for Organization. To distinguish between the two, we need a column to indicate if a row represents a Person or an Organization. For convenience and clarity, we add a field (i.e. column) called proxy_name, and use that to store the name of the proxy class.
So, enter the ProxyManager model manager and the proxy_name field:
from django.db import models
class ProxyManager(models.Manager):
def get_queryset(self):
return super().get_queryset().filter(proxy_name=self.model.__name__)
class Party(models.Model):
proxy_name = models.CharField(max_length=20)
name = models.CharField(max_length=20)
person_attribute = models.CharField(max_length=20)
organization_attribute = models.CharField(max_length=20)
def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
self.proxy_name = type(self).__name__
super().save(*args, **kwargs)
class Person(Party):
class Meta:
proxy = True
objects = ProxyManager()
class Organization(Party):
class Meta:
proxy = True
objects = ProxyManager()
Now the queryset returned by Person.objects.all() will only contain Person objects (and the same for Organization).
However, this does not work in the case of a ForeignKey relation to Party, as in Address.party above, because that will always return a Party instance, regardless of the value of the proxy_name field (also see docs). For example, suppose we create an address = Address(party=person_instance), then address.party will return a Party instance, instead of a Person instance.
Step 3: extend the Party constructor
One way to deal with the related-field issue is to extend the Party.__new__ method, so it returns an instance of the class specified in the 'proxy_name' field. The end result looks like this:
class Party(models.Model):
PROXY_FIELD_NAME = 'proxy_name'
proxy_name = models.CharField(max_length=20)
name = models.CharField(max_length=20)
person_attribute = models.CharField(max_length=20)
organization_attribute = models.CharField(max_length=20)
def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
""" automatically store the proxy class name in the database """
self.proxy_name = type(self).__name__
super().save(*args, **kwargs)
def __new__(cls, *args, **kwargs):
party_class = cls
try:
# get proxy name, either from kwargs or from args
proxy_name = kwargs.get(cls.PROXY_FIELD_NAME)
if proxy_name is None:
proxy_name_field_index = cls._meta.fields.index(
cls._meta.get_field(cls.PROXY_FIELD_NAME))
proxy_name = args[proxy_name_field_index]
# get proxy class, by name, from current module
party_class = getattr(sys.modules[__name__], proxy_name)
finally:
return super().__new__(party_class)
Now address.party will actually return a Person instance if the proxy_name field is Person.
As a last step, we can make the whole thing re-usable:
Step 4: make it re-usable
To make our rudimentary Single-Table Inheritance implementation re-usable, we can use Django's abstract inheritance:
inheritance/models.py:
import sys
from django.db import models
class ProxySuper(models.Model):
class Meta:
abstract = True
proxy_name = models.CharField(max_length=20)
def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
""" automatically store the proxy class name in the database """
self.proxy_name = type(self).__name__
super().save(*args, **kwargs)
def __new__(cls, *args, **kwargs):
""" create an instance corresponding to the proxy_name """
proxy_class = cls
try:
field_name = ProxySuper._meta.get_fields()[0].name
proxy_name = kwargs.get(field_name)
if proxy_name is None:
proxy_name_field_index = cls._meta.fields.index(
cls._meta.get_field(field_name))
proxy_name = args[proxy_name_field_index]
proxy_class = getattr(sys.modules[cls.__module__], proxy_name)
finally:
return super().__new__(proxy_class)
class ProxyManager(models.Manager):
def get_queryset(self):
""" only include objects in queryset matching current proxy class """
return super().get_queryset().filter(proxy_name=self.model.__name__)
Then we can implement our inheritance structure as follows:
parties/models.py:
from django.db import models
from inheritance.models import ProxySuper, ProxyManager
class Party(ProxySuper):
name = models.CharField(max_length=20)
person_attribute = models.CharField(max_length=20)
organization_attribute = models.CharField(max_length=20)
class Person(Party):
class Meta:
proxy = True
objects = ProxyManager()
class Organization(Party):
class Meta:
proxy = True
objects = ProxyManager()
class Placement(models.Model):
party = models.ForeignKey(to=Party, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
More work may be required, depending on your needs, but I believe this covers some of the basics.
I think the OP is asking about Single-Table Inheritance as defined here:
Relational databases don't support inheritance, so when mapping from objects to databases we have to consider how to represent our nice inheritance structures in relational tables. When mapping to a relational database, we try to minimize the joins that can quickly mount up when processing an inheritance structure in multiple tables. Single Table Inheritance maps all fields of all classes of an inheritance structure into a single table.
That is, a single database table for a whole hierarchy of entity classes. Django does not support that kind of inheritance.
There are currently two forms of inheritance in Django - MTI (model table inheritance) and ABC (abstract base classes).
I wrote a tutorial on what's going on under the hood.
You can also reference the official docs on model inheritance.
See my attempt:
http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/2408/
An emulation of "table per hierarchy" a.k.a. "single table inheritance" in Django. The base class must hold all the fields. It's subclasses are not allowed to contain any additional fields and optimally they should be proxies.
Not exactly "single table inheritance", but close enough for many situations.
this might be of use: https://github.com/craigds/django-typed-models
It looks to be somewhat of an implementation of Single Table Inheritance but it has the limitation that subclasses can't have any extra fields.
here is a recent discussion on the django developer mailing list about STI:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/django-developers/-UOM8HNUnxg/6k34kopzerEJ
I think you can do something akin to this.
I have to implement a solution for this problem myself, and here was how I solved it:
class Citrus(models.Model):
how_acidic = models.PositiveIntegerField(max_value=100)
skin_color = models.CharField()
type = models.CharField()
class TangeloManager(models.Manager):
def get_query_set(self):
return super(TangeloManager, self).get_query_set().filter(type='Tangelo')
class Tangelo(models.Model):
how_acidic = models.PositiveIntegerField(max_value=100)
skin_color = models.CharField()
type = models.CharField()
objects = TangeloManager()
class Meta:
# 'appname' below is going to vary with the name of your app
db_table = u'appname_citrus'
This may have some locking issues... I'm not really sure how django handles that off the top of my head. Also, I didn't really test the above code, it's strictly for entertainment purposes, to hopefully put you on the right track.