Extending a Django Database dynamically? - django

Question

I am building an app in Django that allows users to add items to their profile, such as previous work experience. The problem that I am running into is that different users have different amounts of experience. My current approach is to have a model that looks something like:
class MyModel(models.Model):
owner = models.ForeignKey(User, related_name='modelowner', on_delete=models.CASCADE)
experience1_company = models.TextField(null=True, blank=True)
experience2_company = models.TextField(null=True, blank=True)
experience3_company = models.TextField(null=True, blank=True)
...
experience10_company = models.TextField(null=True, blank=True)
experience1_title = models.TextField(null=True, blank=True)
experience2_title = models.TextField(null=True, blank=True)
experience3_title = models.TextField(null=True, blank=True)
...
experience10_title = models.TextField(null=True, blank=True)
In my present model the user can enter up to 10 previous roles, which covers about 95%+ of users. However, this obviously has the problem where each previous experience a user enters has lots five other attributes (start date, end date, title, description, location). meaning that the model ends up with something like 60 total attributes... and if I need to add something new, I have to add it 10 times.
Question: Is there a way to dynamically build new model attributes for the users that have more than X number of experiences or is best practice to have each one explicitly defined in the model and just have a practical cutoff (e.g., you can only enter up to 10)?

Answer 1

You would have to change your model to represent one experience like this:
class Experience(models.Model):
owner = models.ForeignKey(User, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
company = models.TextField(null=True, blank=True)
title = models.TextField(null=True, blank=True)
# and as much other fields as you like:
start_date = models.DateField()
end_date = models.DateField()
description = models.TextField(null=True, blank=True)
location = models.TextField(null=True, blank=True)
Now you can create unlimited Experience instances for each user, and fetch them with:
user = User.objects.get(username='bob')
Experience.objects.filter(owner=user)
or
user.experience_set.all()
Documentation on this topic is in Making queries - following relationships "backward"

Answer 2

You need a model to store work experience information such as(job_title,company_name, start_date, end_date, duties) and link this work experience model to the user profile. something like below:
class WorkExperience(models.Model):
person = models.ForeignKey(User, blank=True, null=True)
job_title = models.CharField(max_length=125)
company_name = models.CharField(max_length=125)
start_date = models.DateField()
end_date = models.DateField()
duties_description = models.CharField(max_length=125)
This way, your application can accommodate any number of WorkExperience per user