as the question states, how do I do create a many-to-one relationship in django models?
Basically, I have two models: Article and Comic, I want to have one Comment model which will have a relationship with both Article and Comic, but not both.
So if a Comment object has a relationship with an Article object, then it wont have a relationship with a Comic object.
I am currently doing it the following way, which does not work:
class Article(models.Model):
#other fields
class Comic(models.Model):
#other fields
class Comment(models.Model):
article = models.ForeignKey(Article)
comic = models.ForeignKey(Comic)
I would really appreciate some help.
This is tricky. I think there are a couple ways you could model this.
Using your current way you could enforce your uniqueness constraint in the application.
class Comment(models.Model):
article = models.ForeignKey(Article)
comic = models.ForeignKey(Comic)
def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
# assert that there is either comic OR article but not both
super(Comment, self).save(*args, **kwargs)
with this way, what happens if you add another model that you want Comment to reference?? You will have to manually add the conditional for the new type in your save method and perform a migration.
Django provides GenericForeignKey field that would allow you to reference any model from Comment. https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/ref/contrib/contenttypes/#generic-relations
This would allow you to create a generic reference from Comment to either Article or Comic, and since it is only one field, would by default be mutually exclusive. I find querying and using GenericeForeignKeys awkward; but they are still an option, that might work fine for your use case.
Another powerful option, (my favorite) could be to create a polymorphic model, which would also be mutually exclusive.
Each Comment could reference a generic Piece of Content, using model inheritance. (I did not test the following, so it will probably not work as copied/pasted)
class Content(models.Model):
objects = InheritanceManager()
# shared content fields could be stored in this model
class Article(Content):
# article specific fields
class Comic(Content):
# comic specific fields
class Comment(models.Model):
content = models.OneToOneField(Content)
This is a powerful way to model the relationship of Comment to any Content. This DOES add additional query overhead, and should warrant an audit for your use case.
InheritanceManager is a utility provided by django-model-utils package, and is pretty lightweight. I have used in in production environment and it is performant, as long as you understand the additional query overheard involved with modeling your data using it. https://django-model-utils.readthedocs.org/en/latest/managers.html#inheritancemanager
The query overhead is explained in the documentation.
If you think you will add additional Content subclasses in the future this could be a scalable way to model your relationship, and provides more flexibility in filtering then GenericForeignKeys.
Well, you can add another field to you Comment model. Like
class Comment(models.Model):
article = models.ForeignKey(Article, null = True)
comic = models.ForeignKey(Comic, null = True)
assigned = models.BooleanField(initial=False)
Once a comment object is created, put either article or comic to point at another object and make assigned = True.
Related
I'm using Django 1.9 on my site and I need an effective way of completely ignore the inactive users, so I don't send them any notifications, emails, etc.
I've tried using a custom Model Manager that only returns the active ones, like this:
class ActiveAccountsManager(models.Manager):
use_for_related_fields = True
def get_queryset(self):
return super(ActiveAccountsManager, self).get_queryset().filter(user__is_active=True)
class Account(models.Model):
class Meta:
verbose_name = _('Account')
verbose_name_plural = _('Accounts')
objects = ActiveAccountsManager()
all_accounts = models.Manager() # Enabling the obtention of all the users, instead of only the active ones
user = models.OneToOneField(User)
type = models.IntegerField(choices=ACCOUNT_TYPES, default=-1)
And, while it works exactly as I want when I directly try to query Account objects, it doesn't when they are referenced through an object that has a ForeignKey relation with it. For example, if I had a Comment model like the following one:
class Comment(models.Model):
author = models.ForeignKey(Account)
I'd like that, when I query for Comment objects, the ones whose author is a inactive user (i.e. an user that the default Manager of the Account model won't return) aren't returned either, instead of the current behavior that returns the comment but says that the account related to it does not exist
Is there any way of achieving this without specifically defining a custom ModelManager on the Comment class? Because the thing is that I want to achieve this in a lot of classes related to the Account one and I can't think of a way of doing it without being extremely repetitive.
Please, don't hesitate to ask if any part of my question isn't clear enough or if I need to provide more details about my code. Thank you so much in advance.
It should already work in your case, as the docs (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/topics/db/managers/#default-managers) say:
Default managers
If you use custom Manager objects, take note that the first Manager
Django encounters (in the order in which they’re defined in the model)
has a special status. Django interprets the first Manager defined in a
class as the “default” Manager, and several parts of Django (including
dumpdata) will use that Manager exclusively for that model. As a
result, it’s a good idea to be careful in your choice of default
manager in order to avoid a situation where overriding get_queryset()
results in an inability to retrieve objects you’d like to work with.
Since the ActiveAccountsManager declaration comes first in your model, it should be already marked as the "default" one.
If you were to update to Django >= 1.10, you can set up explicitly the default manager for your model (see https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.11/ref/models/options/#default-manager-name).
I have a simple notification model:
class Notification(models.Model):
user = models.ForeignKey(User)
sender = models.ForeignKey(User)
model = '''What to put here?'''
comment = models.CharField(max_length=200)
created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=False,auto_now_add=True)
I need the notification to relate to several different models, for example; posts, user follows, etc
Is there anyway in django you can relate to several models instead of creating a notification model for each one?
I want to avoid models like this:
PostLikeNotification, UserFollowNotification, etc.
So does django have this functionality? I couldn't find it anywhere in the docs.
You could use Content Types/Generic Relations
class Notification(models.Model):
user = models.ForeignKey(User)
sender = models.ForeignKey(User)
object_id = models.PositiveIntegerField(default=None, null=True)
content_type = models.ForeignKey(ContentType, default=None, null=True)
comment = models.CharField(max_length=200)
created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=False,auto_now_add=True)
#property
def model_object(self):
content_type = self.content_type
object_id = self.object_id
if content_type is not None and object_id is not None:
MyClass = content_type.model_class()
model_object = MyClass.objects.filter(pk=object_id)
if model_object.exists():
return model_object.first()
return None
Here we are storing the Model (Using the Content Types framework) and Primary Key (must be an Integer in this example) of the related object in the Notification model, then adding a property method to fetch the related object.
With this you can relate your notifications to any other model. You could also use the ForeignKey.limit_choices_to argument on the content_type field to validate that it only accepts certain models.
Django need to know the model before creating a relation, you can store the model in char field like post:23 user_follow:41 and define a get_model method that will parse that field and return the right model object
All depends on your design, you have several options. Different options depend on the size of your database:
How many notifications are there?
Do you need to update the notifications often?
Or most of the notifications are inserted once and then read often?
Use an abstract model
Use an abstract model and actually create the PostLikeNotification and UserFollowNotification and other models of such a kind.
class Notification(models.Model):
# ...
class Meta:
abstract = True
class PostLikeNotification(Notification):
model = models.ForeignKey(SomePost)
class UserFollowNotification(Notifcation):
model = models.ForeignKey(Follower)
# ...
This has several advantages:
You keep your relations in your (relational) database.
You have strong foreign keys to prevent inconsistent data.
It is "Djangoic": relations in the database, starting with a normalised database, and no early optimisations are django's way of doing things.
And, of course, this has some disadvantages:
If you need to search all notifications for something the query will be complex.
Moreover, a query over all notifications will be slow, since it filters several tables.
Use a CharField
You can use a simple CharField and store in it the model name and id. Or two fields one for the name and another for the id.
class Notification(models.Model):
model_type = models.CharField(max_len=48)
model_id = models.PositiveInteger()
Advantages:
You have a single table, querying is faster if you have the right indexes.
You can get one of the types of notifications with a simple comparison (index model_type for extra speed).
Disadvantages:
Inconsistent data may appear.
You will need to add extra code at a higher level to deal with possible inconsistent data.
Parallel writes (that may need to lock the entire table) may be a problem.
The middle ground, use several foreign keys
This is just one way of implementing a middle ground between the two options below: You add several nullable foreign keys. Other ways of achieving middle ground exist.
class Notification(models.Model):
model_post = models.ForeignKey(SomePost, null=True, blank=True)
model_follow = models.ForeignKey(Follower, null=True, blank=True)
Advantage:
Verification of inconsistent data can be made without searching other tables (foreign keys are foreign keys, the database takes care of their consistency).
Disadvantage:
It has most of the disadvantages of the other two methods but to a lesser extent (at least in most of them).
Conclusion
If you're just starting a project, and you do not know (or are not worried) about the volume of data then do create several tables. Abstract models were created for this purpose.
On the other hand if you have a lot of notifications to be read and filtered (by a lot, I mean millions) then you have good reasons to create a single notification table and process the relations at a higher level. Note that this incurs locking problems, you shall (almost) never lock notifications if you have a single table.
I'm really really confused about how django handles database relationships.
Originally I had an article model that contained a simple IntegerField for article_views, recently I'm trying to expand the definition of a article_view to contain it's own fields so I created a model for it. (IP, SESSION KEY etc..)
I'm at a bit of a loss regarding how to make the relationship, to me it makes the most sense to have a one-to-many field inside the article model, because an article can have many different views, but a view can only be part of one article.
all the implementations I'm seeing have this set up in a really weird reverse manner, what gives?
Unfortunately Django does not have a One-to-Many field. This is achieved by creating a ForeignKey on in this case the ArticleView model. When you want to easily access the article views in your template you can set the related_name on the ForeignKey.
class Article(models.Model):
# Article definition
class ArticleView(models.Model):
article = models.ForeignKey(Article, related_name='views')
In the template you can now use article.views.count() to get the number of views coupled to an account.
Please note that this creates a database query for each count you want. It would probably be better to have a queryset with annotate: Article.objects.annotate(num_views=Count('views'))
I've pored over the Django docs regarding the contenttypes framework several times, and I simply don't understand it well enough to implement generic relations in my project. I've looked for online examples or tutorials regarding the matter, but I can't find a single one. Call me dumb, but I need some help on this one (please don't answer by simply linking to the docs). Based on the lack of resources online, I believe if you answer this question with a thorough example, your answer may be the most helpful example online to date regarding django generic relations (bonus!).
So, my question is: can someone show a simple example of the models and maybe a couple lines of code showing how to interact with instances of a generic model?
As inspiration, here is what I believe would be a very common situation:
A site has media items that are largely treated the same, but are slightly different. For example, let's say there are image and video items, and users can "like" an item or "comment" on an item. The likes and comments should be treated the same, regardless of whether they are posted on an image or video item. So, if there is an ItemView for viewing an image or a video in a user's album, the following kinds of calls would be possible : mediaitem.comments.all() or len(mediaitem.likes.all()) or comment.user_who_commented, without having to know which kind of media item it is (image or video).
I believe you would need six models for this:
Abstract MediaItem class
Two different types of media item: ImageItem and VideoItem
Abstract MediaItemActions class
Two different types of actions that can be done towards media items: Like and Comment
If you know how to use this Django feature, please show us a full example! I feel like it would be an extremely powerful tool and am aching to use it in my application. The more explicit, the better.
Your use case sounds very similar to the (now deprecated) Django comments framework. If you check out the models, you'll see how to use a generic relation in BaseCommentAbstractModel--note that you need all three fields, a ForeignKey to ContentType, a field to hold the objects' pks, and the GenericForeignKey field.
As for how to query for objects by GenericForeignKey, you can see some examples in the template tags in that project. See for example the get_query_set method in BaseCommentNode, which retrieves comments by querying on the content type and pk of the target object.
def get_query_set(self, context):
ctype, object_pk = self.get_target_ctype_pk(context)
if not object_pk:
return self.comment_model.objects.none()
qs = self.comment_model.objects.filter(
content_type = ctype,
object_pk = smart_text(object_pk),
site__pk = settings.SITE_ID,
)
I actually have a very similar situation on one of my projects, with various media types.
class TaggedItem(models.Model):
tag = models.SlugField()
content_type = models.ForeignKey(ContentType)
object_id = models.PositiveIntegerField()
content_object = generic.GenericForeignKey('content_type', 'object_id')
class ReviewedItem(models.Model):
content_type = models.ForeignKey(ContentType)
object_id = models.PositiveIntegerField()
content_object = generic.GenericForeignKey('content_type', 'object_id')
review = models.ForeignKey("Review")
class CreativeWork(models.Model):
#other fields
keywords = generic.GenericRelation("TaggedItem",null=True, blank=True, default=None)
reviews = generic.GenericRelation("ReviewedItem",null=True, blank=True, default=None)
class MediaObject(CreativeWork):
#fields
class VideoObject(MediaObject):
#fields
class AudioObject(MediaObject):
#fields
Every Video or Audio is a MediaObject, which is a CreativeWork.
CreativeWorks have a GenericRelation to tags and Reviews. So now anything can be tagged or reviewed.
All you need is for the 'action' to have a ForeignKey to ContentType.
Than add a GenericRelation to your model. I actually found the django.docs to be pretty helpful :)
But if not hope this helps.
Another option is Polymorphic Models. I won't say it is the way you should go, but that it could perhaps be an option.
I am a fan of both generic foreign keys and Polymorphic Models. Polymorphic Models work best in those scenarios where there is a lot of similarity in the models.
I want to model an article with revisions in Django:
I have following in my article's models.py:
class Article(models.Model):
title = models.CharField(blank=False, max_length=80)
slug = models.SlugField(max_length=80)
def __unicode__(self):
return self.title
class ArticleRevision(models.Model):
article = models.ForeignKey(Article)
revision_nr = models.PositiveSmallIntegerField(blank=True, null=True)
body = models.TextField(blank=False)
On the artlcle model I want to have 2 direct references to a revision - one would point to a published revision and another to a revision that is being actively edited. However from what I understand, OneToOne and ForeignKey references generate a backreference on the other side of the model reference, so my question is, how do i create a one-way one-to-one reference in Django?
Is there some special incantation for that or do I have to fake it by including state into revision and custom implementations of the fields that ask for a revision in specific state?
Edit: I guess, I've done somewhat poor job of explaining my intent. Let's try it on a higher abstraction level:
My original intent was to implement a sort of revisioned article model, where each article may have multiple revisions, where one of those revisions may be "published" and one actively edited.
This means that the article will have one-to-many relationship to revisions (represented by ForeignKey(Article) reference in ArticleRevision class) and two one way references from Article to revision: published_revision and edited_revision.
My question is mainly, how can I model this with Django's ORM.
The back-references that Django produces are programatic, and do not affect the underlying Database schema. In other words, if you have a one-to-one or foreign key field on your Article pointing to your Revision, a column will be added to the Article table in the database, but not to the Revision table.
Thus, removing the reverse relationship from the revision to the article is unnecessary. If you really feel strongly about it, and want to document in your code that the backlink is never used, a fairly common Django idiom is to give the fields a related_name attribute like _unused_1. So your Article model might look like the following:
class Article(models.Model):
title = models.CharField(blank=False, max_length=80)
slug = models.SlugField(max_length=80)
revision_1 = models.OneToOneField(ArticleRevision, related_name='_unused_1')
revision_2 = models.OneToOneField(ArticleRevision, related_name='_unused_2')
def __unicode__(self):
return self.title
That said, it's rare that a one-to-one relationship is actually useful in an application (unless you're optimizing for some reason) and I'd suggest carefully reviewing your DB schema to make sure this is really what you want. It may make sense to keep a single ForeignKey field on your ArticleRevision pointing back to an Article (since an ArticleRevision will, presumably, always need to be associated with an Article) and adding another column to Revision indicating whether it's published.
What is wrong with the link going both ways? I would think that the OneToOneField would be the perfect choice here. Is there a specific reason why this will be a detriment to your application? If you don't need the backreference why can't you just ignore it?