Django Dynamic/Clone Models

Question

I am looking for a way to achieve the following with Django, would appreciate it if someone can point me in the right direction to do this.

There are 3 registered models in an app (Model1,Model2 and Model3). The user will submit a form (single field, e.g. Project Name and Submit button), let's say the project he creates by submitting this form is 'PROJECT001'. Then what is expected to be done is to copy/clone the 3 models (Model1,Model2 and Model3) with a suffix of the project, i.e. 3 new models should be created 'PROJECT001_Model1', 'PROJECT001_Model2', 'PROJECT001_Model3'.

I have tried to search for this, however can't find any resources. The closest I have found is https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/DynamicModels but this documentation seems confusing. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

Sören Weber · Accepted Answer · 2022-07-19 21:19:30Z

1

If there's no specific reason for cloning your models, I would suggest a different structure here: You could add a project model and create foreign keys on the other three models linking to it. This way you would have instances of Model1, Model2, Model3 specific to individual projects.

from django.db import models

class Project(models.Model):
    pass

class Model1(models.Model):
    project = models.ForeignKey(Project, on_delete=models.CASCADE)

class Model2(models.Model):
    project = models.ForeignKey(Project, on_delete=models.CASCADE)

class Model3(models.Model):
    project = models.ForeignKey(Project, on_delete=models.CASCADE)

answered Jul 19, 2022 at 21:19

Sören Weber

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2 Comments

babsdoc Over a year ago

Thanks Soren. This works too but the 3 models in question have a vertical structure i.e. fewer columns and a huge number of rows. I'm worried that it would impact the performance. Do you think my concern is valid?

Sören Weber Over a year ago

It really depends on specifics here. Generally, I would argue that having a normalized database is a great advantage in later development. Also, as you already found out, it would be tricky to realize the dynamic creation and management of tables using Django. Lastly, your ForeignKey field will automatically create a database index which should help performance significantly here.

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