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Django still stuck (Many to Many)

the idea is that students can send a ping to their teacher if they do not understand something, but first I am trying to get the student, teacher and whatever class they are in relationship
so in my models after a few attempts I have come up with this
Models
from django.db import models
class Student(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
class Teacher(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length = 70)
class Lecture(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length = 70)
members = models.ManyToManyField(
Student,
through = 'part_of_class',
through_fields = ('lecture', 'student'),
)
lecturers = models.ManyToManyField(
Teacher,
through = 'Teacher_of_class',
through_fields = ('lecture', 'teacher'),
)
class Teacher_of_class(models.Model):
lecture = models.ForeignKey(Lecture)
teacher = models.ForeignKey(Teacher)
class part_of_class(models.Model):
lecture = models.ForeignKey(Lecture)
student = models.ForeignKey(Student)
Question is adding a student field messes up, and Im not even sure this is the right way, it sounds right in my head but I am sure I am missing something, any clues?

I'm not entirely sure that you need explicit intermediary relationships (Teacher_of_class and part_of_class). Instead, you should try utilizing fields within the other models to do what you want. For example, will a lecture generally have more than one teacher, or just one? You could model either of those with a field in Lecture.
Edit: Apologies, I misread your code initially with regards to the fields. My suggestion is to not use an additional relationship class unless you know why you need it.

If you just want to have a lecture that can have multiple students and multiple lecturers, you do not need to have the intermediate models, Django will handle this for you if you don't specify any. I would only use the intermediate tables if you wanted to store something with that relationship.
Also when trying to add your student and teacher objects to the lecture model, be sure to save them.
Your save code should look something like this:
aStudent = Student(name="Taco")
aTeacher = Teacher(name="Burrito")
aStudent.save()
aTeacher.save()
aLecture = Lecture(name="Cooking With Python!")
aLecture.members.add(aStudent)
aLecture.lecturers.add(aTeacher)
aLecture.save()
Hope this helps!

Large ManyToMany relations on django admin form

So, I have the following models:
class Band(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
class Contract(models.Model):
band = models.ForeignKey(Band)
when = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
salary = models.IntegerField()
class Musician(models.Model):
first_name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
last_name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
instrument = models.CharField(max_length=100)
bands = models.ManyToManyField(Band, through=Contract)
class Album(models.Model):
artist = models.ForeignKey(Musician)
name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
release_date = models.DateField()
num_stars = models.IntegerField()
So, I wanted to expose that on the admin page. So far, so good.
Note that our musicians here keep jumping in and out from bands. Some say one of them even had been on over 2 millions bands in his life-time. I don't know, maybe the bands are Whitesnake, Metallica or something.
How should we do that on the Django Admin Page?
I tried using raw_id_fields and apart the fact I didn't like the effect, it didn't work so well. It took a lot of time to load and it didn't let me add more ids. Weird.
I've used admin.StackedInline with no luck cause it will try to load every contract in a which, well, it's gonna take only 2 thousand years.
When Musician had a direct relation to Band it worked just fine with this library. But now that the relation isn't an straight one. Looks like autocomplete doesn't support it(it was getting slow anyway).
So, with all of this, I ask you lord SO members. What's the best way to do this? Is it autocomplete? Someone must have had to come across this issue!
Thanks in advance.

To avoid loading every bands in your admin page use autocomplete_fields Django doc.
Just use it like that in your admin.py.
autocomplete_fields = ('bands',)
Then no bands will be pulled from DB to front, but you will be able to select it through a Select2 search field and it will be printed as "tags".

I found this solution and hope it will help somebody in the same situation:
I have many to many relations between the Product and Characteristic model.
So, in the admin.py I am setting a form for a Product like the following where catch/get all the Characteristics and make the "prefecth_related" for Characteristic, as well the "select_related" could be done there:
class ProductAdminForm(forms.ModelForm):
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
self.fields['characteristics'].queryset = Characteristic.objects.prefetch_related('category').all()

What are the benefits of having two models instead of one?

I've a Django model
class Person(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
team = models.ForeignKey(Team)
And a team model
class Team(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
Then, I would like to add a 'coach' property which is a one to one relationship to person. If I am not wrong, I have two ways of doing it.
The first approach would be adding the field to Team:
class Team(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
coach = models.OneToOneField(Person, related_name='master')
The second one would be creating a new model:
class TeamCoach(models.Model):
team = models.OneToOneField(Team)
coach = models.OneToOneField(Person)
Is this right ? is there a big difference for practical purposes ? which are the pro and cons of each approach ?

I will say NEITHER, as every Person has a Team and if every Team has a Coach, it's rather redundant circulation and somewhat unnecessary.
Better to add a field in Person called type directly is more clean and direct, something like:
class Person(models.Model):
# use _ if you care about i18n
TYPES = ('member', 'member',
'coach', 'coach',)
name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
team = models.ForeignKey(Team)
type = models.CharField(max_length=20, choices=TYPES)
Although I would seriously consider refactoring Person to be more generic and get Team to have a ManyToMany to Person... in that case, you can re-use Person in other areas, like Cheerleaders.
class Person(models.Model):
# use _ if you care about i18n
TYPES = ('member', 'member',
'coach', 'coach',)
name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
type = models.CharField(max_length=20, choices=TYPES)
class Team(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
member = models.ManyToManyField(Person, related_name='master')
Make your models more generic and DRY, they should be easily manageable and not tightly coupled to certain fields (unless absolutely necessary), then the models are more future proof and will not fall under migration nightmare that easily.
Hope this helps.

I can't agree so easy with #Anzel, and since the name of the question is
What are the benefits of having two models instead of one?
I'll try to give my two cents. But before i start i want to place some quotes from the docs.
It doesn’t matter which model has the ManyToManyField, but you should
only put it in one of the models – not both.
Generally, ManyToManyField instances should go in the object that’s
going to be edited on a form. In the above example, toppings is in
Pizza (rather than Topping having a pizzas ManyToManyField ) because
it’s more natural to think about a pizza having toppings than a
topping being on multiple pizzas. The way it’s set up above, the Pizza
form would let users select the toppings.
Basically that's the first thing you should have in mind when creating a M2M relation (your TeamCoach model is that, but more on that in a second) which one is the object holding the relation. What would be more suitable for your problem - choosing a coach for a team when you create it, or choosing a team for a person when you create it? IF you ask me i would prefer the second variant and keep the teams inside of the Person class.
Now lets go to the next section of the docs
Extra fields on many-to-many relationships
When you’re only dealing with simple many-to-many relationships such
as mixing and matching pizzas and toppings, a standard ManyToManyField
is all you need. However, sometimes you may need to associate data
with the relationship between two models.
For example, consider the case of an application tracking the musical
groups which musicians belong to. There is a many-to-many relationship
between a person and the groups of which they are a member, so you
could use a ManyToManyField to represent this relationship. However,
there is a lot of detail about the membership that you might want to
collect, such as the date at which the person joined the group.
For these situations, Django allows you to specify the model that will
be used to govern the many-to-many relationship. You can then put
extra fields on the intermediate model. The intermediate model is
associated with the ManyToManyField using the through argument to
point to the model that will act as an intermediary.
That's actually the answer of your question, having an intermediate model give you the ability to store additional data about the collection. Consider the situation where a coach moves to another team next season, if you just update the M2M relation, you will loose the track of his past teams where he was coaching. Or you will never be able to answer the question who was the coach of that team at year XXX. So if you need more data, go with intermediate model. This is also were #Anzel going wrong, the type field is an additional data of that intermediate model, it's place must be inside it.
Now here is how i would probably create the relations:
class Person(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
teams = models.ManyToManyField('Team', through='TeamRole')
class Team(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
class TeamRole(models.Model):
COACH = 1
PLAYER = 2
CHEERLEADER = 3
ROLES = (
(COACH, 'Coach'),
(PLAYER, 'Player'),
(CHEERLEADER, 'Cheerleader'),
)
team = models.ForeignKey(Team)
person = models.ForeignKey(Person)
role = models.IntegerField(choices=ROLES)
date_joined = models.DateField()
date_left = models.DateField(blank=True, null=True, default=None)
How will I query this? Well, I can use the role to get what type of persons I'm looking for, and I can also use the date_left field to get the current persons participating in that team right now. Here are a few example methods:
class Person(models.Model):
#...
def get_current_team(self):
return self.teams.filter(teamrole__date_left__isnull=True).get()
class Team(models.Model):
#...
def _get_persons_by_role(self, role, only_active):
persons = self.person_set.filter(teamrole__role=role)
if only_active:
return persons.filter(teamrole__date_left__isnull=True)
return persons
def get_coaches(self, only_active=True):
return self._get_persons_by_role(TeamRole.COACH, only_active)
def get_players(self, only_active=True):
return self._get_persons_by_role(TeamRole.PLAYER, only_active)

django: need to design models/forms for a 'multiple level nested' structures

Assume some Company with Employees. There are Name and Contact information bound to each Employee. Each Contact contains Street and Phones fields.
What I want is a page which lists employees within a company. But everything must be listed as forms. Because I want to be able to modify the particular Employee information and the most important - I want to be able to add new Employees (clicking a button "Add new employee" must add a new empty "Employee form"). As well as it must allow to add a new phone number to the existing Employee's Contact information any time.
The data model looks like:
--Company
----Employee1
------Name
------Contact
--------Street
--------Phones
----------Phone1
----------Phone2
----Employee2
------Name
------Contact
--------Street
--------Phones
----------Phone1
----------Phone2
----------Phone3
...
Could someone please help to design Models and Forms for such a task? Your help is very much appreciated. Many thanks!
P.S. Forgot to mention that I want all the data "collected" in the Company object at the end of the day. I mean when I serialize c = Comapany.objects.all()[0] on the back end the entire employee information must be visible, like c.employees[0].contact.phones[0] must be the first employee's first phone number. Thanks.
P.P.S.
That is not the case that I'm just forwarding my project. This is just an hypothetical example I'd created to present the problem. I'm a django newbie and trying to understand how the framework gets things rolling.
I've spent lot of time on this. I've found several ways to go, but no one got me to the end. For instance, a wonderful blog about nested formsets http://yergler.net/blog/2013/09/03/nested-formsets-redux/ helped with forms and rendering. But, it solved only the half of the problem. The data like I mentioned above is not "being collected" into an object. At the end of the day I want to serialize a Company object and save it in yaml format using pyyaml (see my previous post django: want to have a form for dynamically changed sequence data).
Django is perfect with "static" models and forms, ModelForms are awesome. But what if your model needs to be changed dynamically? No standard way to go. Either no appropriate documentation nor I could find a one. Thus, I'd like to hear how experts imagine the solution for such a problem.

Try this:
from django.db import models
class _Contact(object):
pass
class Company(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=255)
created_at = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
#property
def employees(self):
return self.employee_set.prefetch_related('phones').order_by('-created_at')
class Phone(models.Model):
number = models.CharField(max_length=255)
created_at = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
class Employee(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=255)
street = models.CharField(max_length=255)
phones = models.ManyToManyField('Phone', through='EmployeePhone', blank=True)
created_at = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
company = models.ForeignKey(Company)
#property
def contact(self):
_contact = _Contact()
_contact.street = self.street
_contact.phones = self.phones.order_by('-employeephone__created_at')
return _contact
class EmployeePhone(models.Model):
employee = models.ForeignKey(Employee)
phone = models.ForeignKey(Phone)
created_at = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
However, you should just use employee.street and employee.phones. employee.contact is redundant.

Django: Ordering objects by their children's attributes

Consider the models:
class Author(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=200, unique=True)
class Book(models.Model):
pub_date = models.DateTimeField()
author = models.ForeignKey(Author)
Now suppose I want to order all the books by, say, their pub_date. I would use order_by('pub_date'). But what if I want a list of all authors ordered according to who most recently published books?
It's really very simple when you think about it. It's essentially:
The author on top is the one who most recently published a book
The next one is the one who published books not as new as the first,
So on etc.
I could probably hack something together, but since this could grow big, I need to know that I'm doing it right.
Help appreciated!
Edit: Lastly, would the option of just adding a new field to each one to show the date of the last book and just updating that the whole time be better?

from django.db.models import Max
Author.objects.annotate(max_pub_date=Max('books__pub_date')).order_by('-max_pub_date')
this requires that you use django 1.1
and i assumed you will add a 'related_name' to your author field in Book model, so it will be called by Author.books instead of Author.book_set. its much more readable.

Or, you could play around with something like this:
Author.objects.filter(book__pub_date__isnull=False).order_by('-book__pub_date')

Lastly, would the option of just adding a new field to each one to show the date of the last book and just updating that the whole time be better?
Actually it would! This is a normal denormalization practice and can be done like this:
class Author(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=200, unique=True)
latest_pub_date = models.DateTimeField(null=True, blank=True)
def update_pub_date(self):
try:
self.latest_pub_date = self.book_set.order_by('-pub_date')[0]
self.save()
except IndexError:
pass # no books yet!
class Book(models.Model):
pub_date = models.DateTimeField()
author = models.ForeignKey(Author)
def save(self, **kwargs):
super(Book, self).save(**kwargs)
self.author.update_pub_date()
def delete(self):
super(Book, self).delete()
self.author.update_pub_date()
This is the third common option you have besides two already suggested:
doing it in SQL with a join and grouping
getting all the books to Python side and remove duplicates
Both these options choose to compute pub_dates from a normalized data at the time when you read them. Denormalization does this computation for each author at the time when you write new data. The idea is that most web apps do reads most often than writes so this approach is preferable.
One of the perceived downsides of this is that basically you have the same data in different places and it requires you to keep it in sync. It horrifies database people to death usually :-). But this is usually not a problem until you use your ORM model to work with dat (which you probably do anyway). In Django it's the app that controls the database, not the other way around.
Another (more realistic) downside is that with the naive code that I've shown massive books update may be way slower since they ping authors for updating their data on each update no matter what. This is usually solved by having a flag to temporarily disable calling update_pub_date and calling it manually afterwards. Basically, denormalized data requires more maintenance than normalized.

def remove_duplicates(seq):
seen = {}
result = []
for item in seq:
if item in seen: continue
seen[item] = 1
result.append(item)
return result
# Get the authors of the most recent books
query_result = Books.objects.order_by('pub_date').values('author')
# Strip the keys from the result set and remove duplicate authors
recent_authors = remove_duplicates(query_result.values())

Building on ayaz's solution, what about:
Author.objects.filter(book__pub_date__isnull=False).distinct().order_by('-book__pub_date')