model functions to interact with other models

[Brandon Graves]

I've been trying to find some "best practice" information on this and have been coming up dry.

I have a "User" Model and an "event" model that tracks things that happens to users: Start date, End date, Status, etc.
From a purely logical Object oriented perspective, it feels right to add functions to the User model that will handle getting/updating/saving/changing Events.

so that User.GetStart() could be called, or User.ChangeStatus("Active") or something, would find the current non-superseded event relevent to the EventType, and supersede it, and save a new event... Is this ok? is that a bad idea? In my head it seems like the most natural and logical way to do it, but my gut is telling me that I should seek some advice before I go down this path.

Any input would be appreciated!

[Antonis Christofides]

First, common practice is to name methods with lower case and underscores. Now, you probably don't need User.get_start(), because if "user" is a "User" you can usually type in something like "user.event_set.latest()". If the query is more complicated and you use it many times, I think it's OK to create user.get_start() or something.

I don't have anything against User.change_status(); I think it would work. However if there's no compelling reason I'd probably do it explicitly rather than call a method:

event = Event(user=user, ...)
event.save()

Antonis Christofides
http://djangodeployment.com

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