Django: need help in designing relationships between models - django

Question

I have an app which allows to associate to each client multiple boards, boards where I can upload files relevant for the client to make decisions about how the website page in question will look.
So the relationships I need to model are:
one client, multiple boards;
one board, one client;
one board, multiple files;
Let's concentrate on the first two
models.py
class Board(models.Model):
title = models.CharField(max_length=120, verbose_name="Titolo")
description = models.TextField()
files = models.FileField( null=True, blank=True, upload_to = 'clients_download_area', verbose_name = 'Client Reserved File')
date = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True, verbose_name = 'Data di pubblicazione')
def __str__(self):
return str(self.title)
class Client(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=30)
address = models.CharField(max_length=120)
boards = models.ManyToManyField(Board, blank=True)
def __str__(self):
return str(self.name)
Ok, relationship #1 is done. But what if I need to know which client is associated to a board (relationship #2)?
If I set a new field to Board Class
class Board(models.Model):
[...]
client = models.ForeignKey(Client, blank = True)
of course, when I makemigrations Django complains because it does not know what Client is, since I define it in the next model.
How can I design this DB?
Thank you in advance for any help you could provide

Answer 1

The problem here is that you reference to an identifer (here Client), before it is constructed (since Board is defined before the Client class).
Django has some support for this: you can pass strings that contain the name of the model. In the same app, you can just use ClassName, for another app, you can use other_app.ClassName, like the documentation says:
If you need to create a relationship on a model that has not yet been defined, you can use the name of the model, rather than the model
object itself:
from django.db import models
class Car(models.Model):
manufacturer = models.ForeignKey(
'Manufacturer',
on_delete=models.CASCADE,
)
# ...
class Manufacturer(models.Model):
# ...
pass
So here you can write it like:
class Board(models.Model):
title = models.CharField(max_length=120, verbose_name="Titolo")
description = models.TextField()
files = models.FileField( null=True, blank=True, upload_to = 'clients_download_area', verbose_name = 'Client Reserved File')
date = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True, verbose_name = 'Data di pubblicazione')
client = models.ForeignKey(
'Client',
related_name='my_boards'
on_delete=models.CASCADE
)
def __str__(self):
return str(self.title)
class Client(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=30)
address = models.CharField(max_length=120)
boards = models.ManyToManyField(Board, blank=True)
def __str__(self):
return str(self.name)
Note however that you already defined a ManyToManyField relation from Client to Board. Although it is possible it is not very common that two such relations exists simultaneously.
If you define a ForeignKey relationship from Board to Client, then Django automatically creates a reverse relationship (with the related_name), such that some_client.my_boards, is a manager of all the related Boards.

Answer 2

I think you can pass model class name instead of the class itself:
class Board(models.Model):
[...]
client_id = models.ForeignKey('Client', blank=True)