Creating a variable field in model Django

Question

I want to ask the user how many questions they want to ask; based on their response, I want to populate a model with those many fields. The way I am currently thinking about doing that is as follows:

from __future__ import unicode_literals
from django.db import models

class Interview(models.Model):
    title = models.TextField()
    description = models.TextField()
    number_questions = models.IntegerField()
    question_one = models.ForeignKey('Question', related_name='question_one')
    question_two = models.ForeignKey('Question', related_name='question_two')
    question_three = models.ForeignKey('Question', related_name='question_three')
    question_four = models.ForeignKey('Question', related_name='question_four')
    question_five = models.ForeignKey('Question', related_name='question_five')

class Question(models.Model):
    question_description = models.TextField()
    prep_time = models.IntegerField()
    response_time = models.IntegerField()

I realize that this solution is inefficient because a) the user is limited to a preset number of questions and b) if the user specifies less than 5 questions, there are unnecessary question entries created. What is a better way to go about storing multiple questions?

user2390182 · Accepted Answer · 2017-02-04 23:14:57Z

1

Do the foreign key relation the other way round. That's how you model a many-to-one relation:

class Interview(models.Model):
    title = models.TextField()
    description = models.TextField()

    @property
    def number_questions(self):
        return self.questions.count()

class Question(models.Model):
    interview = models.ForeignKey(Interview, related_name='questions')
    question_description = models.TextField()
    prep_time = models.IntegerField()
    response_time = models.IntegerField()

Now you can access an interview's question via:

interview.questions.all()

An Interview can now have any number of Questions. Btw, the related_name of all the ForeignKeys in your original Interview model should have been 'interview' to make any semantic sense.

edited Feb 4, 2017 at 23:14

answered Feb 4, 2017 at 23:01

user2390182

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