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This project is currently unmaintained

django-mptt works by storing pre-computed left/right/level/tree_id values alongside each row. This makes reads very fast, but it means that every insert, move, or delete must update a potentially large number of sibling and ancestor rows. This write amplification is the fundamental reason the library is hard to maintain: concurrent writes can race and corrupt the tree (see Concurrency), bulk operations bypass the update logic entirely, and any code that touches the database outside of django-mptt (raw SQL, bulk_update, migrations) can leave the tree in an inconsistent state. Rebuilding with rebuild() is the escape hatch, but it rewrites every row, which is slow for large tables.

If you are starting a new project, or can afford to migrate, consider an alternative. Newer databases support recursive Common Table Expressions (CTE), which let you store only a parent FK and compute ancestry on the fly. See django-tree-queries for such an implementation and its announcement blog post. Other alternatives are listed on Django Packages.

django-mptt itself is kept alive on a best-effort basis — bugs get fixed when reported with a clear reproduction, compatibility with new Django versions is maintained, but new features will not be added.

django-mptt

Utilities for implementing Modified Preorder Tree Traversal with your Django Models and working with trees of Model instances.

Build Status

Project home: https://github.com/django-mptt/django-mptt/

Documentation: https://django-mptt.readthedocs.io/

Bug reports: https://github.com/django-mptt/django-mptt/issues

What is Modified Preorder Tree Traversal?

MPTT is a technique for storing hierarchical data in a database. The aim is to make retrieval operations very efficient.

The trade-off for this efficiency is that performing inserts and moving items around the tree are more involved, as there’s some extra work required to keep the tree structure in a good state at all times.

Here are a few articles about MPTT to whet your appetite and provide details about how the technique itself works:

What is django-mptt?

django-mptt is a reusable Django app that aims to make it easy for you to use MPTT with your own Django models.

It takes care of the details of managing a database table as a tree structure and provides tools for working with trees of model instances.

Requirements

Feature overview

  • Simple registration of models - fields required for tree structure will be added automatically.

  • The tree structure is automatically updated when you create or delete model instances, or change an instance’s parent.

  • Each level of the tree is automatically sorted by a field (or fields) of your choice.

  • New model methods are added to each registered model for:

    • changing position in the tree

    • retrieving ancestors, siblings, descendants

    • counting descendants

    • other tree-related operations

  • A TreeManager manager is added to all registered models. This provides methods to:

    • move nodes around a tree, or into a different tree

    • insert a node anywhere in a tree

    • rebuild the MPTT fields for the tree (useful when you do bulk updates outside of Django)

  • Form fields for tree models.

  • Utility functions for tree models.

  • Template tags and filters for rendering trees.

  • Admin classes for visualizing and modifying trees in Django’s administration interface.

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