Configurable Foreign Keys

Warning

This is just a stub document. It will be fleshed out more. If you wish to comment on it, please e-mail coreyoordt at gmail.

We had a staff model that we wanted to related it to in some projects, but not all. So in the application settings we use a django function called get_model. This allows you to specify the model in an app-dot-model format in the project settings and then dynamically import it

from django.conf import settings
from django.db.models import get_model

model_string = getattr(settings, 'VIEWPOINT_AUTHOR_MODEL', 'auth.User')
AUTHOR_MODEL = get_model(*model_string.split('.'))

Now we simply import the AUTHOR_MODEL setting, which is a django model. And use it as the parameter for the ForeignKey field.

from viewpoint.settings import AUTHOR_MODEL

class Entry(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    author = models.ForeignKey(AUTHOR_MODEL)
    ...