Doctrine Uni-Directional ManyToOne and Cascades - doctrine-orm

I have the following setup
Todos have Notes
Notes are authored by Users
.
class Todo {
protected $notes;
}
class Note {
protected $todo;
protected $author;
}
class User {
// does not have any link to Note.
}
User does not have any link to Note, how do I then cascade my persist there. I thought Note being the owning side of the relationship, I just need $note->author = $user. And won't need something like $user->getNotes()->add($author). I was thinking if in my app, if I don't need to access Notes from Users, I don't add a link to clutter my class.

I'm not sure if I get this right, but; if your User doesn't have a reference to their notes then you won't need to cascade any actions because it's a uni-directional relationship.
Be sure to re-read Working with Associations.

Related

django multi-table inheritance, access method from child from instance of parent

I am using Multi-Table inheritance (aka Concrete Inheritance), where I have a non-abstract model + DB Table called Clients, which is concerned with common details concerning all the clients.
But a client can be an Individual, Partnership or Company, for which I have created inheriting models and tables. An Individual has first name + last name, and company has other specific particulars, etc.
I want to be able to access the names of clients (derived from the columns from the child tables) when I want a list of all clients.
After lot of searching, I found that this tutorial, works successfully.
Basically, it involves inserting a column on the Client table, which will store the name of the Child model. Then using that name, the appropriate child model is identified and appropriate child method is accessed.
But it seems to be a slightly cumbersome way to implement polymorphism in Multi-Table inheritance.
I want to know whether since 2012, Django has introduced any better way to deal with the issue, or is this still the only way?
Please let me know if my code sample is required, but the link provided has a beautiful example already.
There is django-model-utils application with Inheritance Manager. It will cast automatically your parent class to children instances. Example from docs:
from model_utils.managers import InheritanceManager
class Place(models.Model):
# ...
objects = InheritanceManager()
class Restaurant(Place):
# ...
class Bar(Place):
# ...
nearby_places = Place.objects.filter(location='here').select_subclasses()
for place in nearby_places:
# "place" will automatically be an instance of Place, Restaurant, or Bar
Also check this question for generic solution with ContentType.
And also check awesome article by Jeff Elmore about this topic. Quite old, but still great.

Is There a Good Way to Forbid Templates Accessing Related Managers Through Model Instances

I need an elegant way of disabling or authorizing related field traversal in Django templates.
Imagine following setup for models.py:
class Person(models.Model):
pass
class Secret(models.Model):
owner = models.ForeignKey(Person, related_name="secrets")
Now imagine this simple view that gives the template QuerySet of all Person instances in the system just so the template could put them in a list.
def show_people(request):
render_to_response("people.html", {people=Person.objects.all()})
Now my problem is that I would not provide the templates myself in this imaginary system and I don't fully trust those who make the templates. The show_people view gives the people.html template the secrets of the Person instances through the related_name="secrets". This example is quite silly but in reality I have model structures where template providers could access all kind of vulnerable data through related managers.
The obvious solution would be not to give models to templates but to convert them in to some more secure data objects. But that would be pain in my case because the system is already quite big and it's up and running.
I think a cool solution to this would be somehow preventing related field traversal in templates. Another solution would be to have such custom related managers that could have access to the request object and filter the initial query set according to the request.user.
A possible solution could be to use a custom model.Manager with your related models.
Set use_for_related_fields = True to force Django to use it instead of the plain manager. modify the manager to filter the data as needed.
also have a look at this:
Django: using managers for related object access (use_for_related_fields docs)
stackoverflow: use_for_related_fields howto, very good explanation here.

What is better way to have multiple type of member profiles in django

I see another question on stackoverflow.com whose title seems similar but that doesnot fulfil my requirements and my users are very different so only different roles will may be not work well. I have scenario of job portal where one type of user is a company which have different attributes different functionality while other is candidate who can show his profile and resume e.t.c., they will have different URLs. So they are totally different but common thing is that they are both Registered users. They will use login forms, they will have change password and I intend to use User class for that purpose.
Actual problem I am facing is about UserProfile class usage. UserProfile is use for profiles but in my case these two users are totally different and need many different things in profile. Also I will may be add more user types in system in future. While in django, we tell about profile is by adding this single model in settings.py
AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE = ‘accounts.userprofile’
So is there a way to do this by using some sort of inheritance or abstract class in django or some other way so that I can get intended functionality and can use django Profiles?
EDIT: Ok, upon further inspection, my previous answer clearly will not work.
I had advocated abstracting the UserProfile class. However, if you do that, you cannot instantiate it, so you're back to square one.
However, you can use Multi-table inheritance to achieve what you want. See this in the docs and this Quora thread that provided the inspiration.
The code I posted before remains largely unchanged, save for the exclusion of the Meta sub-class and the abstract variable.
class UserProfile(models.Model):
# Some Stuff
class CompanyProfile(UserProfile):
# Some more stuff
class CandidateProfile(UserProfile):
# Even more stuff

ManyToMany relationship between inherited model and its parent

Probably easiest to explain with an example:
class Item(models.Model):
# ...
class ComplexItem(Item):
components = models.ManyToManyField(Item, through='ComponentItem', symmetrical=False, related_name='component_of')
class ComponentItem(models.Model):
# ...
item = models.ForeignKey(ComplexItem)
component = models.ForeignKey(Item, related_name='used_in_items
I would like a table of Items, with a name, price etc. Then I would like to define ComplexItems which are Items in their own right, but they require other Items in varying quantities.
The above causes the following exception in the admin app:
<class 'inventory.models.ComponentItem'> has more than 1 ForeignKey to <class 'inventory.models.ComplexItem'>
I need to override instance methods in ComplexItem and generally seperate the behavior from Item and the inheritance makes sense from a pure data view.
Is there some alternative definition of this relationship? I'd also like to avoid needing 'related_name' on both ComponentItem.component and ComplexItem.components.
You need to go back to the drawing board. While it's probably technically possible for a model to both inherit from and simultaneously be composed of another model, it's going to get sticky quick.
Try making ComplexItem just inherit from models.Model like Item does. Bet you that change alone will fix everything.
The model above actually works fine (I think, I haven't tested and decided against it for the moment). However the table generated for ComplexItem only has one column pointing to Item, which is fairly useless.
The functionality of ComponentItem can still be gotten by defining a ManyToMany relationship from Item to 'self' through ComponentItem.
Defining separate behavior is as easy as creating a Proxy model.
The actual error above came from my admin.Inline not being able to pick the correct foreign key to use for a ComponentItem, which can be solved like this.
I may come back to the inheritance above, but this works for now.

Smarter removing objects with many-to-many relationship in Django admin interface

I'd like to remove some object with many-to-many relationship using Django admin interface. Standard removing also removes all related objects and the list of removed objects displayed on confirmation page. But I don't need to remove related objects!
Assume we have ContentTopic and ContentItem:
class ContentTopic(models.Model):
name = models.CharField()
code = models.CharField()
class ContentItem(models.Model):
topic = models.ManyToManyField(ContentTopic, db_index=True,\
blank=True, related_name='content_item')
So, I'd like to remove ContentTopic instance using Django admin, but I don't need remove all related ContentItems. So, confirmation page should display only ContentTopic instance to remove.
What is the best way to handle this?
This happens so, coz its developed to do so.
If you want to change this behaviour, the one way can be over-riding delete method of django.db.models.Model.
This delete() method actually does two things, first gathering a list of all dependent objects and delete them. So here, you can override it, to get that list of dependent objects, iterating over it and set their reference to None, instead of deleting them. And thus deleting the concerned object cleanly.
May be if you want this behavior throughout, you can extend a class from django.db.models.Models, override delete(), and extend all your models from this new class.