Design Decision: GFK Reverse Lookups

[Carlton Gibson]

Hi All.

https://github.com/django/django/pull/9748 adds the ability to perform simple queries on a generic foreign key: 

    TaggedItem.objects.filter(content_object=object_instance)

You still can't do anything more complex, such as:

    TaggedItem.objects.get(content_object__name='Diamond')

This is a long standing Someday/Maybe: https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/3006

The patch seems more or less OK to me but I'm not sure if we shouldn't instead guide users firmly towards defining a GenericRelation. 

GenericRelation provides for the more powerful querying, and, this way, provides the one correct way™ to do things. 

I'm wondering what the correct view should be: whether we take this patch or close the issue as wontfix and solely recommend GenericRelation. 

Thanks for your input. 

Kind Regards,

Carlton

[Tim Graham]

I'd lean toward a wontfix. In particular, making changes in django/db/models/sql/query.py for a contrib app doesn't look like a good separation of concerns. Is there a downside to the alternative of adding the GenericRelation?

[Adam Johnson]

I agree, adding more functionality to the ORM for this one limited use case doesn't seem worth it, especially given GenericRelation's existence.

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