Django Generic ForeignKey vs Multiple Foreign Key Fields

[Arun Prabhakar]

# I have 2 models, say A and B
class A(models.Model):
    pass

class B(models.Model):
    pass

"""
Now my query is which of the following would you choose and why?
"""

class GenericFK(models.Model):

    content_type = models.ForeignKey(ContentType)
    object_id = models.PositiveIntegerField()
    content_object = generic.GenericForeignKey('content_type', 'object_id')

#-- vs --

class MultipleFK(models.Model):
    a = models.ForeignKey(A, null=True)
    b = models.ForeignKey(B, null=True)


Thank you.

[Martin J. Laubach]

  It's simply a question of what you want to model.

  GenericFK means for each instance "I have a relationship with some other (undefined) entity". MultipleFK means "I have relationships with both well-known entities A and B". Totally different things.

  Cheers,

    mjl

[Arun Prabhakar]

Hi Martin,

A and B are known, and more can come in the future, so it would seem generic is the way to go, but then I dont want to reference on all tables in django.
But using the FK has problem of introducing alter tables later.

Confused about going with which approach.

What do you suggest?

[Javier Guerra Giraldez]

On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 5:34 AM, Arun Prabhakar <arun...@gmail.com> wrote:
> more can come in the future

that's reason enough to use Generic relations


--
Javier

[Javier Guerra Giraldez]

(of course, much better would be if you can refactor your data
representation so you can go with a fixed set of tables)

--
Javier