Modify Tables in database - django

I have this model
class Category(models.Model):
category_name= models.CharField(max_length=255)
sub_category_ID = models.IntegerField(null=True, blank=True)
def __unicode__(self):
return self.category_name
I already have data in the table but I want to change the sub_category_ID to without deleting the entire database.
class Category(models.Model):
category_name= models.CharField(max_length=255)
sub_category_ID = models.ForeignKey('self',null=True, blank=True)
def __unicode__(self):
return self.category_name
So I run syncdb after I changed the model and it gave me the warning.
The following content types are stale and need to be deleted:
uTriga | event_event_category
Any objects related to these content types by a foreign key will also
be deleted. Are you sure you want to delete these content types?
If you're unsure, answer 'no'.`
I typed yes and now am getting the error
column app_category.sub_category_ID_id does not exist
column uTriga_category.sub_category_ID_id does not exist

By default, Django syncdb mechanism doesn't allow model changes. The entire database has to be dropped and recreated. Only new models can be added between two syncb runs.
So you'd probably want to use some 'migration' tool that allows progressive evolutions of the DB schema. This is almost always a very good idea to use one IMHO.
South is the most famous for Django, and so far I've been pretty happy with it.

Related

Use of select_related in simple query in django

I have a model in Django in which a field has a fk relationship with the teacher model. I have came across select_related in django and want to use it in my view. However, I am not sure whether to use it in my query or not.
My models:
class Teacher(models.Model):
name = models.OneToOneField(max_length=255, default="", blank=True)
address = models.CharField(max_length=255, default="", blank=True)
college_name = models.CharField(max_length=255, default="", blank=True)
class OnlineClass(models.Model):
teacher = models.ForeignKey(Teacher,on_delete=models.CASCADE)
My view:
def get(self, request,*args, **kwargs):
teacher = self.request.user.teacher
classes = Class.objects.filter(teacher=teacher) #confusion is here..............
serializer_class = self.get_serializer_class()
serializer = serializer_class(classes,many=True)
return Response(serializer.data,status=status.HTTP_200_OK)
I have commented on the line or the section of the problem. So I wanted to list all the classes of that teacher. Here I have used filter. But can we use select_related here?? What I understood is if I want to show another fields of teacher model as well, for eg name or college_name, then I have to use it. Otherwise the way I have done it is correct. Also, select_related is only used for get api not for post api, is that correct??
First, the easiest way to get all classes per teacher is by using the related_name attribute (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.2/ref/models/fields/#django.db.models.ForeignKey.related_name).
class OnlineClass(models.Model):
teacher = models.ForeignKey(
Teacher,
on_delete=models.CASCADE,
related_name='classes'
)
# All classes of a teacher
teacher.classes.all()
When select_related is used, new sql joins are added to the Django internals SQL query. It is useful to reduce the workload in the database engine, getting the data quickly, and yes, is only for reading.
for obj in OnlineClass.objects.all():
# This hits the database every cycle to get the teacher data,
# with a new query like: select * from teacher_table where id = ...
print(obj.teacher)
for obj in OnlineClass.objects.select_related('teacher').all():
# This don'ts hits the database.
# Previously, the Django ORM joined the
# OnlineClass and Teacher data with a single SQL query.
print(obj.teacher)
I think that, in your example, with only one teacher, using "select_related" or not don't make big difference.
select_related is used to select additional data from related objects when the query is executed. It results in a more complex query. But it boosts performance if you have to access related data, since no additional database queries will be required.
See documentation here.
In your code it would be possible to use select_related, but it would be inefficient, because you're not accessing related objects of the queried classes. So using select_related would result in a more complex query without any advantage.
If you wanted to use select_related, the syntax would be classes = Class.objects.select_related('teacher').filter(teacher=teacher)

Django project architecture advice

I have a django project and I have a Post model witch look like that:
class BasicPost(models.Model):
author = models.ForeignKey('auth.User', on_delete=models.CASCADE)
published = models.BooleanField(default=False)
created_date = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
title = models.CharField(max_length=100, blank=False)
body = models.TextField(max_length=999)
media = models.ImageField(blank=True)
def get_absolute_url(self):
return reverse('basic_post', args=[str(self.pk)])
def __str__(self):
return self.title
Also, I use the basic User model that comes with the basic django app.
I want to save witch posts each user has read so I can send him posts he haven't read.
My question is what is the best way to do so, If I use Many to Many field, should I put it on the User model and save all the posts he read or should I do it in the other direction, put the Many to Many field in the Post model and save for each post witch user read it?
it's going to be more that 1 million + posts in the Post model and about 50,000 users and I want to do the best filters to return unread posts to the user
If I should use the first option, how do I expand the User model?
thanks!
On your first question (which way to go): I believe that ManyToMany by default creates indices in the DB for both foreign keys. Therefore, wherever you put the relation, in User or in BasicPost, you'll have the direct and reverse relationships working through an index. Django will create for you a pivot table with three columns like: (id, user_id, basic_post_id). Every access to this table will index through user_id or basic_post_id and check that there's a unique couple (user_id, basic_post_id), if any. So it's more within your application that you'll decide whether you filter from a 1 million set or from a 50k posts.
On your second question (how to overload User), it's generally recommended to subclass User from the very beginning. If that's too late and your project is too far advanced for that, you can do this in your models.py:
class BasicPost(models.Model):
# your code
readers = models.ManyToManyField(to='User', related_name="posts_already_read")
# "manually" add method to User class
def _unread_posts(user):
return BasicPost.objects.exclude(readers__in=user)
User.unread_posts = _unread_posts
Haven't run this code though! Hope this helps.
Could you have a separate ReadPost model instead of a potentially large m2m, which you could save when a user reads a post? That way you can just query the ReadPost models to get the data, instead of storing it all in the blog post.
Maybe something like this:
from django.utils import timezone
class UserReadPost(models.Model):
user = models.ForeignKey("auth.User", on_delete=models.CASCADE, related_name="read_posts")
seen_at = models.DateTimeField(default=timezone.now)
post = models.ForeignKey(BasicPost, on_delete=models.CASCADE, related_name="read_by_users")
You could add a unique_together constraint to make sure that only one UserReadPost object is created for each user and post (to make sure you don't count any twice), and use get_or_create() when creating new records.
Then finding the posts a user has read is:
posts = UserReadPost.objects.filter(user=current_user).values_list("post", flat=True)
This could also be extended relatively easily. For example, if your BasicPost objects can be edited, you could add an updated_at field to the post. Then you could compare the seen_at of the UserReadPost field to the updated_at field of the BasicPost to check if they've seen the updated version.
Downside is you'd be creating a lot of rows in the DB for this table.
If you place your posts in chronological order (by created_at, for example), your option could be to extend user model with latest_read_post_id field.
This case:
class BasicPost(models.Model):
# your code
def is_read_by(self, user):
return self.id < user.latest_read_post_id

When splitting a Django model, How to keep ForeignKey and ManyToMany relationships during data migration?

I have a Django model that is doing way too much. Here's an abbreviated example of the model. Basically, it can represent four different Entity types, and there are recursive ForeignKey and ManyToMany relationships that point to other entities.
This project is currently using Django 1.8.x and Python 2.7.x, but I can upgrade those if the solution requires it.
class Entity(models.Model):
"""
Films, People, Companies, Terms & Techniques
"""
class Meta:
ordering = ['name']
verbose_name_plural = 'entities'
# Types:
FILM = 'FILM'
PERSON = 'PERS'
COMPANY = 'COMP'
TERM = 'TERM'
TYPE_CHOICES = (
(FILM, 'Film'),
(PERSON, 'Person'),
(COMPANY, 'Company'),
(TERM, 'Term/Technique'),
)
created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True, auto_now=False)
updated = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=False, auto_now=True)
type = models.CharField(max_length=4, choices=TYPE_CHOICES, default=FILM)
slug = models.SlugField(blank=True, unique=True, help_text="Automatically generated")
name = models.CharField(max_length=256, blank=True)
redirect = models.ForeignKey('Entity', related_name='entity_redirect', blank=True, null=True, help_text="If this is an alias (see), set Redirect to the primary entry.")
cross_references = models.ManyToManyField('Entity', related_name='entity_cross_reference', blank=True, help_text="This is a 'see also' — 'see' should be performed with a redirect.")
[... and more fields, some of them type-specific]
I realize this is rather messy, and I'd like to remove 'type' and make an EntityBase class that abstracts out all of the common fields, and create new Film, Person, Company, and Term models that inherit from the EntityBase abstract base class.
Once I create the new models, I think I understand how to write the data migration to move all of the field data over to the new models (iterate over objects from Entity, filtered via type, create new objects in the appropriate new model)... except the ForeignKey and ManyToMany relationships. Maybe I'm thinking about this the wrong way, but how can I transfer those relationships when, during the migration, the new object that the relationship points to may not exist yet?
I suspect this may mean a multi-step migration, but I haven't quite worked out the right way to do it.
There is nothing magical about m2m and fk fields. This is the procedure that I would follow... It might be a bit blunt, but will get the job done:
Make a BACKKKUPPPPPPppp of the database!!
Make another backup!
Create the new model and migration
Write a new data migration that will manually iterate over existing models and update the new model, one-by-one. Don't be afraid of the for loop here, unless you have millions of entries in db.
Delete redundant models and/or fields, make migration for this.
Run those migrations :)
In practice, this means a lot of restoring from the "BACKKKUPPPPPPppp" until the migrations are just right.
One little thing to take care of:
M2m fields cannot get any value if model is not yet saved (because model gets its ID on first save). I would do something like, in the manual migration:
new_instance = NewModel()
new_instance.somefield = "whatever"
new_instance.meaning = 42
....
new_instance.save()
new_instance.that_m2m_field.add(some_related_obj)
Of course, make sure you read the docs in detail, especially that bit about importing the model class - you can't just import it from myapp.models import MyModel, instead do:
MyModel = apps.get_model("myapp", "MyModel")
One possible tripping stone might be the model inheritance that you plan to introduce. Generally, you will want to operate on the child model, and access the parent from there as / if needed. Parent can be accessed via the implicit ptr attribute - in your example it would be entitybase_ptr or something similar (that is just a OneToOne field). Going in the other direction, however, (from parent to unknown child) is not as straightforward, because parent doesn't a priori know what is the class of its child.

Basic relations in django (built on top of a legacy db)

I've googled on and on, and I just don't seem to get it.
How do I recreate simple join queries in django?
in models.py (Fylker is county, Dagensrepresentanter is persons)
class Fylker(models.Model):
id = models.CharField(max_length=6, primary_key=True)
navn = models.CharField(max_length=300)
def __unicode__(self):
return self.navn
class Meta:
db_table = u'fylker'
class Dagensrepresentanter(models.Model):
id = models.CharField(max_length=33, primary_key=True)
etternavn = models.CharField(max_length=300, blank=True)
fornavn = models.CharField(max_length=300, blank=True)
fylke = models.ForeignKey(Fylker, db_column='id')
def __unicode__(self):
return u'%s %s' % (self.fornavn, self.etternavn)
class Meta:
ordering = ['etternavn'] # sette default ordering
db_table = u'dagensrepresentanter'
Since the models are auto-created by django, I have added the ForeignKey and tried to connect it to the county. The id fields are inherited from the db I'm trying to integrate into this django project.
By querying
Dagensrepresentanter.objects.all()
I get all the people, but without their county.
By querying
Dagensrepresentanter.objects.all().select_related()
I get a join on Dagensrepresentanter.id and Fylker.id, but I want thet join to be on fylke, aka
SELECT * FROM dagensrepresentanter d , fylker f WHERE d.fylke = f.id
This way I'd get the county name (Fylke navn) in the same resultset as all the persons.
Additional request:
I've read over the django docs and quite a few questions here at stackoverflow, but I can't seem to get my head around this ORM thing. It's the queries that hurt. Do you have any good resources (blogposts with experiences/explanations, etc.) for people accustomed to think of databases as an SQL-thing, that needs to start thinking in django ORM terms?
Your legacy database may not have foreign key constraints (for example, if it is using MyISAM then foreign keys aren't even supported).
You have two choices:
Add foreign key constraints to your tables (would involve upgrading to Innodb if you are on MyISAM). Then run ./manage inspectdb again and the relationships should appear.
Use the tables as is (i.e., with no explicit relationships between them) and compose queries manually (e.g., Mytable.objects.get(other_table_id=23)) either at the object level or through writing your own SQL queries. Either way, you lose much of the benefit of python's ORM query language.

Django many to many recursive relationship

I'm not so great with databases so sorry if I don't describe this very well...
I have an existing Oracle database which describes an algorithim catalogue.
There are two tables algorithims and xref_alg.
Algorithims can have parents and children algorithms. Alg_Xref contains these relationships with two foreign keys - xref_alg and xref_parent.
These are the Django models I have so far from the inspectdb command
class Algorithms(models.Model):
alg_id = models.AutoField(primary_key=True)
alg_name = models.CharField(max_length=100, blank=True)
alg_description = models.CharField(max_length=1000, blank=True)
alg_tags = models.CharField(max_length=100, blank=True)
alg_status = models.CharField(max_length=1, blank=True)
...
class Meta:
db_table = u'algorithms'
class AlgXref(models.Model):
xref_alg = models.ForeignKey(Algorithms, related_name='algxref_alg' ,null=True, blank=True)
xref_parent = models.ForeignKey(Algorithms, related_name='algxref_parent', null=True, blank=True)
class Meta:
db_table = u'alg_xref'
On trying to query AlgXref I encounter this:
DatabaseError: ORA-00904: "ALG_XREF"."ID": invalid identifier
So the error seems to be that it looks for a primary key ID which isn't in the table.. I could create one but seems a bit pointless. Is there anyway to get around this? Or change my models?
EDIT: So after a bit of searching it seems that Django requires a model to have a primary key. Life is too short so have just added a primary key. Will this have any impact on performance?
This is currently a limitation of the ORM provided by Django. Each model has to have one field marked as primary_key=True, if there isn't one, the framework automatically creates an AutoField with name id.
However, this is being worked on as we speak as part of this year's Google Summer of Code and hopefully will be in Django by the end of this year. For now you can try to use the fork of Django available at https://github.com/koniiiik/django which contains an implementation (which is not yet complete but should be sufficient for your purposes).
As for whether there is any benefit or not, that depends. It certainly makes the database more reusable and causes less headaches if you just add an auto incrementing id column to each table. The performance impact shouldn't be too high, the only thing you might notice is that if you have a many-to-many table like this, containing only two ForeignKey columns, adding a third one will increase its size by one half. That should, however, be irrelevant as long as you don't store billions of rows in that table.