Joining three or more tables using django ORM - django

I have designed my models such way that all the models will have one to one relation on auth_user table which is User. For your quick reference I am pasting the Picture below
Now I want to select all the data related to username which are in tables BasicDetails, Department and Project. The below query is not fetching the results.
User.objects.select_related().get(username='user1')
Can someone help me on this?
-Vikram

You should use prefetch_related for efficiency, since your relation is reverse (you want to access the other records from User and not the other way around):
u = User.objects.prefetch_related('project_set', 'department_set', 'basicdetails_set').get(username='user1')
This will not generate a single query, but Django will use caching techniques to effectively produce less possible db overhead. If I recall correctly it will produce 4 queries (a single join in 4 tables might be slower anyway, depending on number of records, indexes etc). The benefit is that on subsequent requests no queres will be generated. For example to get a user's projects:
u.project_set.all() #hits the db
u.project_set.all() #cached version, no db hit
For more info see here https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/queries/#one-to-one-relationships.
EDIT: what is project_set?
If your Project model is defined like this
class Project(models.Model):
...
user = models.ForeignKey(User)
then you can do Project.objects.get(pk=1).user to access the user associated to a project instance, but how would you do the opposite (get all projects of a certain user)? Django will automatically include a '_set' property to the other model for convenience. Therefore we can get the projects of a certain user like this:
u = User.objects.get(pk=1)
user_objects = u.project_set.all()
However if you want to explicitly set a name for this reverse relation, django allows you define the ForeignKey with a related_name keyword argument like this:
class Project(models.Model):
...
user = models.ForeignKey(User, related_name='projects')
Now instead of .project_set you could use .projects to access a user's projects:
u = User.objects.get(pk=1)
user_objects = u.projects.all()

Related

Shared models between two Django projects and ForeignKey to a model that exists only in one of them

I have two Django projects that communicate with each other. The first one contains model A and B that has a ForeignKey to A. The first project sends and receives serialized B objects from the second project. I want the second project to contain just B, but it needs the value of that ForeignKey. These models are defined as follows:
class A(models.Model):
...
class B(models.Model):
fk = models.ForeignKey(to='A', on_delete=models.PROTECT)
...
The problem is that ForeignKey to A in model B requires model A to be defined in the second project. Its objects also have to exist so that the database is consistent and there are no problems, e.g., in the admin panel.
In the end, I'd like to treat the fk field as a full-fledged ForeignKey in the first project and as some kind of read-only generic identifier in the second one. Specifically, I need to retain the functionality of querying both ways in the first project, e.g., fk__some_a_field and b_set. I would like to have the same code base for the model in both projects to ensure databases in the two projects stay synchronized. How can I achieve this in a clean way?
EDIT:
I was also considering fk = CustomField(...) which would be more or less defined as
if IS_FIRST_PROJECT:
CustomField = ForeignKey
else:
CustomField = IntegerField
but the issue is that I'd need a clean way to select the type of integer field that exactly matches the default foreign key. Also, I am not sure if such a solution could bring unexpected problems.
Specifically, I need to retain the functionality of querying both ways in the first project, e.g., fk__some_a_field and b_set.
If you want to use django orm, you would have to recreate your A model from project 1 in project 2. But as model A is managed by the project 1, consider adding next lines to your model in project 2:
class A(models.Model):
...
class Meta:
managed = False
db_table = 'your database table name where A model is stored'
managed=False would tell django to ignore migrations for it, and django won't be allowed to change that model's database table.
The other solution if you don't want to duplicate models from project 1 to project 2, is to not use django orm. And write sql queries by yourself. But as you mentioned you don't want to do this
P.S if you don't know how to see name of database table for model A, you can output it like this: a_model_instance._meta.db_table, or look it in some tools like pgadming if you are using postgres

User model with static set of related models

Say I have a User model in django and I want to add some achievements to users. So I've created an Achieve model:
class Achive:
type = ....
value = ....
status = BooleanField(default=False)
I want all those achieves be a static set of models for every user (20 instances, for example) with ability to delete old and create new achieves. The problem is how to do it. Expected flow is:
1) user granted to use achievement system;
2) user got all those achieves (in admin panel shows like a table);
3) in admin panel per user I can change status of every achieve (affects only on edited user);
4) if new Achieve instance is created — add to all users who have achievements;
5) if existed Achieve instance has been deleted — remove from all users;
Solutions with I came up:
1) use Achieve model with jsonfield. store achieves in json like dictionary, use custom widget for admin panel to show checkboxes to change status). But where to store global set of achievements to create new/delete old ones? how to manage it?
2) use many to many field to Achieve and Achieve model without status. Why: if relation between User ← → Achieve exists, that means that user earn an achieve.
Both solutions I don't really like so hope for your advice.
P.S. sqlite is used as db and not allowed to use another (like mongo, etc.)
Thanks in advance!
What you want is a ManyToMany relationship between Achieve and User, but with the ability to store extra data on the relationship (the status for example).
With a normal ManyToManyField on a Model, Django actually creates an intermediate model to store the relationships in the database. By adding a through argument to your ManyToManyField, you can specify the intermediate model used for the relationship and store extra data with the relationship, as documented here:
class Goal(models.Model):
type = ...
value = ...
achievers = models.ManyToManyField(to=User, through='Achievement', related_name='goals')
class Achievement(models.Model):
status = models.BooleanField()
date_reached = models.DateField(null=True)
goal = models.ForeignKey(to=Goal, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
achiever = models.ForeignKey(to=User, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
then you can create and query the relationships like this, assuming you have a user and a goal:
achievement = Achievement.objects.create(status=True, date_reached=date(2018, 10, 12), achiever=user, goal=goal)
user.goals.filter(achievement__status=True) # gives the achieved goals of a user
goal.achievers.filter(achievement__status=True) # gives the users that achieved a goal

10 sites through same codebase django MTI, ABCs or EAV

I have a django based web shop that has been evolving over the past year. Currently there's about 8 country specific shops running through the same code base, plus an API, and there's soon to be a B2B website, and a few more countries to add to the list.
Variations are needed in model structure, particularly around fields in address models, the account model, and so on.
To make matters a bit more complicated, the site is running multidb with each shop instance in a separate db. So I have a situation where I might have a base ABC model, e.g:
class Address(models.Model):
class Meta:
abstract=True
class Address_UK(Address):
class Meta:
db_table="shop_address"
class Address_IT(Address):
class Meta:
db_table="shop_address"
[etc]
Then code throughout the app to select the the correct model, e.g.
if countrysettings.country == "UK":
address = Address_UK()
elif countrysettings.country == "IT":
address = Address_IT()
The countrysettings.country is actually a separate settings class which subclasses threading.local and the country code, which also corresponds with a key in settings.DATABASES, is configured by a geolocation middleware handler. So the correct database is selected, and the model specific variations are reflected in each country database.
But there are problems to this approach:
It completely breaks syncdb and is no good for south, unless I hack ./manage.py so I can pass in the country db, instead of requiring the middleware to set it.
It seems messy. So much if countrysettings.country == "xx": code lying about, and so many sub classed models.
So I was thinking of using django-eav instead, but I foresee problems in the admin, and in particular field ordering. I know that django-eav will build a modelform for the admin that includes the eav fields, but I'd ideally want these to be displayed or hidden relevant to the country.
Also I've considered having a none abstract base class, e.g. Address, and then creating country specific variations where needed (e.g Model Table Inheritance). But then I foresee the base models getting overloaded with one2one fields to each model variant. But it would solve issues with the admin.
Another option might be to have an extra data field, and to serialise additional fields into json or csv or something and store them in this field.
I can think about a few others way to attack your problem. I believe option 1 or option 2 are the best, but one might choose option 3.
Option 1: One code base, One db, One django instance, Sites framwork: If you do not actually need a distinct db for each store, create all tables and/or all possible fields, and smartly use the sites framework for condour fields fields and models. For example: keep for each address a address_type field etc and use different fields (and tables) on the same db for each site. This makes your code more complicated but simplifies your IT a lot. Use this if the code changes between sites is very minimal. (btw - The json serialization is a good option for address).
Option2: One code base, Many DBs, Many django instances: Set many sites with the same code base but carefully use conditional settings and dynamic features of python to generate different models per site. Each site will have it's own settings-uk.py, settings-us.py etc., and will have it's own db and own models using dynamic models. For example:
from django.conf import settings
# ...
class Address(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
if settings.country == "US":
state = models.CharField(max_length=2)
else:
country = models.CharField(max_length=100)
Other possible tricks for this method: Enable/disable apps via the settings; Crafting custom pythonpaths for appsin the wsgi script/manage.py script; use if settings.country=='us': import uk_x as x else: import us_x as x . See also: http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/12/02/flipping-out/
Option3: Parallel code branches, Many DBs, Many django instances: Use git to keep a few branches of your code and rebase them with each other. Requires much more IT effort. If you are planning to have many db and many server, (and many developers?) anyway, you might find this useful.
Another options: One DB, many django instances custom settings.py per instance without sites framework.
Actually EAV can solve your issue. You can in fact use EAV to show fields that a specific to the country attribute of the current object.
Here is an example
class Country(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(_("country"), max_length=50
class Address(eav.models.BaseEntity):
country = models.ForeignKey(Country, related_name="country_attrs")
# EAV specific staff
#classmethod
def get_schemata_for_model(self):
# When creating object, country field is still not set
# So we do not return any country-specific attributes
return AddressEAVSchema.objects.filter(pk=-1).all()
def get_schemata_for_instance(self, qs):
# For specific instance, return only country-specific attributes if any
try:
return AdressEAVSchema.objects.filter(country=self.country).all()
except:
return qs
# Attributes now can be marked as belonging to specific country
class AdressEAVSchema(eav.models.BaseSchema)
country = models.ForeignKey(Country, related_name="country_attrs")
# Rest of the standard EAV stuff
class AdressEAVChoice(eav.models.BaseChoice):
schema = models.ForeignKey(AdressEAVSchema, related_name='choices')
class AddressEAVAttribute(eav.models.BaseAttribute):
schema = models.ForeignKey(AdressEAVSchema, related_name='attrs')
choice = models.ForeignKey(AdressEAVChoice, blank=True, null=True)
Here how to use it:
When you create Address attributes you now have also to specify which country they belong to.
Now, when you create new Address object itself (say in admin), save, and then go back editing it you see additional country-specific attributes that match objects country.
Hope this helps.

Creation of dynamic model fields in django

This is a problem concerning django.
I have a model say "Automobiles". This will have some basic fields like "Color","Vehicle Owner Name", "Vehicle Cost".
I want to provide a form where the user can add extra fields depending on the automobile that he is adding. For example, if the user is adding a "Car", he will extra fields in the form, dynamically at run time, like "Car Milage", "Cal Manufacturer".
Suppose if the user wants to add a "Truck", he will add "Load that can be carried", "Permit" etc.
How do I achieve this in django?
There are two questions here:
How to provide a form where the user can add new fields at run time?
How to add the fields to the database so that it can be retrieved/queried later?
There are a few approaches:
key/value model (easy, well supported)
JSON data in a TextField (easy, flexible, can't search/index easily)
Dynamic model definition (not so easy, many hidden problems)
It sounds like you want the last one, but I'm not sure it's the best for you. Django is very easy to change/update, if system admins want extra fields, just add them for them and use south to migrate. I don't like generic key/value database schemas, the whole point of a powerful framework like Django is that you can easily write and rewrite custom schemas without resorting to generic approaches.
If you must allow site users/administrators to directly define their data, I'm sure others will show you how to do the first two approaches above. The third approach is what you were asking for, and a bit more crazy, I'll show you how to do. I don't recommend using it in almost all cases, but sometimes it's appropriate.
Dynamic models
Once you know what to do, this is relatively straightforward. You'll need:
1 or 2 models to store the names and types of the fields
(optional) An abstract model to define common functionality for your (subclassed) dynamic models
A function to build (or rebuild) the dynamic model when needed
Code to build or update the database tables when fields are added/removed/renamed
1. Storing the model definition
This is up to you. I imagine you'll have a model CustomCarModel and CustomField to let the user/admin define and store the names and types of the fields you want. You don't have to mirror Django fields directly, you can make your own types that the user may understand better.
Use a forms.ModelForm with inline formsets to let the user build their custom class.
2. Abstract model
Again, this is straightforward, just create a base model with the common fields/methods for all your dynamic models. Make this model abstract.
3. Build a dynamic model
Define a function that takes the required information (maybe an instance of your class from #1) and produces a model class. This is a basic example:
from django.db.models.loading import cache
from django.db import models
def get_custom_car_model(car_model_definition):
""" Create a custom (dynamic) model class based on the given definition.
"""
# What's the name of your app?
_app_label = 'myapp'
# you need to come up with a unique table name
_db_table = 'dynamic_car_%d' % car_model_definition.pk
# you need to come up with a unique model name (used in model caching)
_model_name = "DynamicCar%d" % car_model_definition.pk
# Remove any exist model definition from Django's cache
try:
del cache.app_models[_app_label][_model_name.lower()]
except KeyError:
pass
# We'll build the class attributes here
attrs = {}
# Store a link to the definition for convenience
attrs['car_model_definition'] = car_model_definition
# Create the relevant meta information
class Meta:
app_label = _app_label
db_table = _db_table
managed = False
verbose_name = 'Dynamic Car %s' % car_model_definition
verbose_name_plural = 'Dynamic Cars for %s' % car_model_definition
ordering = ('my_field',)
attrs['__module__'] = 'path.to.your.apps.module'
attrs['Meta'] = Meta
# All of that was just getting the class ready, here is the magic
# Build your model by adding django database Field subclasses to the attrs dict
# What this looks like depends on how you store the users's definitions
# For now, I'll just make them all CharFields
for field in car_model_definition.fields.all():
attrs[field.name] = models.CharField(max_length=50, db_index=True)
# Create the new model class
model_class = type(_model_name, (CustomCarModelBase,), attrs)
return model_class
4. Code to update the database tables
The code above will generate a dynamic model for you, but won't create the database tables. I recommend using South for table manipulation. Here are a couple of functions, which you can connect to pre/post-save signals:
import logging
from south.db import db
from django.db import connection
def create_db_table(model_class):
""" Takes a Django model class and create a database table, if necessary.
"""
table_name = model_class._meta.db_table
if (connection.introspection.table_name_converter(table_name)
not in connection.introspection.table_names()):
fields = [(f.name, f) for f in model_class._meta.fields]
db.create_table(table_name, fields)
logging.debug("Creating table '%s'" % table_name)
def add_necessary_db_columns(model_class):
""" Creates new table or relevant columns as necessary based on the model_class.
No columns or data are renamed or removed.
XXX: May need tweaking if db_column != field.name
"""
# Create table if missing
create_db_table(model_class)
# Add field columns if missing
table_name = model_class._meta.db_table
fields = [(f.column, f) for f in model_class._meta.fields]
db_column_names = [row[0] for row in connection.introspection.get_table_description(connection.cursor(), table_name)]
for column_name, field in fields:
if column_name not in db_column_names:
logging.debug("Adding field '%s' to table '%s'" % (column_name, table_name))
db.add_column(table_name, column_name, field)
And there you have it! You can call get_custom_car_model() to deliver a django model, which you can use to do normal django queries:
CarModel = get_custom_car_model(my_definition)
CarModel.objects.all()
Problems
Your models are hidden from Django until the code creating them is run. You can however run get_custom_car_model for every instance of your definitions in the class_prepared signal for your definition model.
ForeignKeys/ManyToManyFields may not work (I haven't tried)
You will want to use Django's model cache so you don't have to run queries and create the model every time you want to use this. I've left this out above for simplicity
You can get your dynamic models into the admin, but you'll need to dynamically create the admin class as well, and register/reregister/unregister appropriately using signals.
Overview
If you're fine with the added complication and problems, enjoy! One it's running, it works exactly as expected thanks to Django and Python's flexibility. You can feed your model into Django's ModelForm to let the user edit their instances, and perform queries using the database's fields directly. If there is anything you don't understand in the above, you're probably best off not taking this approach (I've intentionally not explained what some of the concepts are for beginners). Keep it Simple!
I really don't think many people need this, but I have used it myself, where we had lots of data in the tables and really, really needed to let the users customise the columns, which changed rarely.
Database
Consider your database design once more.
You should think in terms of how those objects that you want to represent relate to each other in the real world and then try to generalize those relations as much as you can, (so instead of saying each truck has a permit, you say each vehicle has an attribute which can be either a permit, load amount or whatever).
So lets try it:
If you say you have a vehicle and each vehicle can have many user specified attributes consider the following models:
class Attribute(models.Model):
type = models.CharField()
value = models.CharField()
class Vehicle(models.Model):
attribute = models.ManyToMany(Attribute)
As noted before, this is a general idea which enables you to add as much attributes to each vehicle as you want.
If you want specific set of attributes to be available to the user you can use choices in the Attribute.type field.
ATTRIBUTE_CHOICES = (
(1, 'Permit'),
(2, 'Manufacturer'),
)
class Attribute(models.Model):
type = models.CharField(max_length=1, choices=ATTRIBUTE_CHOICES)
value = models.CharField()
Now, perhaps you would want each vehicle sort to have it's own set of available attributes. This can be done by adding yet another model and set foreign key relations from both Vehicle and Attribute models to it.
class VehicleType(models.Model):
name = models.CharField()
class Attribute(models.Model):
vehicle_type = models.ForeigngKey(VehicleType)
type = models.CharField()
value = models.CharField()
class Vehicle(models.Model):
vehicle_type = models.ForeigngKey(VehicleType)
attribute = models.ManyToMany(Attribute)
This way you have a clear picture of how each attribute relates to some vehicle.
Forms
Basically, with this database design, you would require two forms for adding objects into the database. Specifically a model form for a vehicle and a model formset for attributes. You could use jQuery to dynamically add more items on the Attribute formset.
Note
You could also separate Attribute class to AttributeType and AttributeValue so you don't have redundant attribute types stored in your database or if you want to limit the attribute choices for the user but keep the ability to add more types with Django admin site.
To be totally cool, you could use autocomplete on your form to suggest existing attribute types to the user.
Hint: learn more about database normalization.
Other solutions
As suggested in the previous answer by Stuart Marsh
On the other hand you could hard code your models for each vehicle type so that each vehicle type is represented by the subclass of the base vehicle and each subclass can have its own specific attributes but that solutions is not very flexible (if you require flexibility).
You could also keep JSON representation of additional object attributes in one database field but I am not sure this would be helpfull when querying attributes.
Here is my simple test in django shell- I just typed in and it seems work fine-
In [25]: attributes = {
"__module__": "lekhoni.models",
"name": models.CharField(max_length=100),
"address": models.CharField(max_length=100),
}
In [26]: Person = type('Person', (models.Model,), attributes)
In [27]: Person
Out[27]: class 'lekhoni.models.Person'
In [28]: p1= Person()
In [29]: p1.name= 'manir'
In [30]: p1.save()
In [31]: Person.objects.a
Person.objects.aggregate Person.objects.all Person.objects.annotate
In [32]: Person.objects.all()
Out[33]: [Person: Person object]
It seems very simple- not sure why it should not be a considered an option- Reflection is very common is other languages like C# or Java- Anyway I am very new to django things-
Are you talking about in a front end interface, or in the Django admin?
You can't create real fields on the fly like that without a lot of work under the hood. Each model and field in Django has an associated table and column in the database. To add new fields usually requires either raw sql, or migrations using South.
From a front end interface, you could create pseudo fields, and store them in a json format in a single model field.
For example, create an other_data text field in the model. Then allow users to create fields, and store them like {'userfield':'userdata','mileage':54}
But I think if you're using a finite class like vehicles, you would create a base model with the basic vehicle characteristics, and then create models that inherits from the base model for each of the vehicle types.
class base_vehicle(models.Model):
color = models.CharField()
owner_name = models.CharField()
cost = models.DecimalField()
class car(base_vehicle):
mileage = models.IntegerField(default=0)
etc

Managers, model inheritance or what for slicing Users in django?

I'm writing a Project in Django where I've 5 kind of groups of Users:
Group1
Group2
...
Then I've a Model, Item which has many relation with users, the Item has one Owner (a User in Group1), a Customer (an User in Group2) and many RelatedUser (Users in Group3).
I'm wondering which is the correct way to write this relations. I'd love to write something like:
class Item(models.Model):
owner = models.ForeignKey(Owner)
customer = models.ForeignKey(Customer)
users = models.ManyToManyField(RelatedUser)
Having defined in some way Owner, Customer and RelatedUser classes.
I do not know how to achieve this. I do not want to use model inheritance, because I just want a table User. Even Managers does not seems to help me. Actually I'm using something like this:
try:
customer = models.ForeignKey(User,
related_name='cust',
limit_choices_to = {'groups__in': [Group.objects.get(name = 'customers')]})
except:
customer = models.ForeignKey(User,
related_name='cust')
Mostly because when starting form an empty database Group 'customers' does not exists and errors are raised.
Which is the right way to afford this?
Thanks in advance
You could define separate models for each user type - each with a ForiegnKey to User. The upside is simplicity, but the down side is that this approach adds multiple tables, and isn't particularly extensible if you need to add more groups later.
Another option is to define a Groups model, which stores the different types of groups available, and has a ManyToMany relationship to User (assuming one user can be in multiple groups).
You can get around the problem of no groups being defined when starting from a new database by creating a fixture for the Groups model . A fixture is a text file (default is JSON format) that defines a set of data that can be easily loaded into the DB, either automatically or manually. Fixtures can be easily created from existing data with the dumpdata management command.
If you wish a fixture to be loaded automatically (when you run syncdb), create a fixtures directory in your app, and name the fixture initial_data. You can also create other fixtures and load them with either the loaddata command, or in your tests by specifying a fixtures list for a particular TestCase