A Django field for defining a principal instance.
Project description
=================
Django Principals
=================
This module provides ``PrincipalField``, a model field for Django_ that allows
instances of a model to be defined as the principal instance for an entire model or
a collection of instances. When the status of one instance is changed, the status
of other items in the collection are updated in response as necessary.
Usage
-----
Add a ``PrincipalField`` to your model; that's it.
If you want to work with all instances of the model as a single collection,
there's nothing else required. To create collections based on one or more
fields on the model, specify the field names using the ``collection`` argument.
In general, the value assigned to a ``PrincipalField`` will be handled like a
unique Boolean value. Setting the principal to ``True`` will
cause all other items to become ``False``within the same collection --
unless, of course, the collection has fewer than two elements.
Multi-table model inheritance
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
By default, if a parent model has a principal field that declares a collection,
child model instances are filtered independently. This behavior can be changed
by specifying a `parent_link` argument identifying the name of the one-to-one
field linking the child model to the parent. If `parent_link` is set, all subclass
instances will be part of a single sequence in each collection.
Limitations
-----------
* Unique constraints can't be applied to ``PrincipalField`` because they break
the ability to update other items in a collection all at once. This one was
a bit painful, because setting the constraint is probably the right thing to
do from a database consistency perspective, but the overhead in additional
queries was too much to bear.
Credits
-------
This code loosely draws on concepts inspired by django-positions_ and django-featured-item_,
two projects which provide custom model fields with different functionality.
.. _`Django`: http://www.djangoproject.com/
.. _`django-positions`: https://github.com/jpwatts/django-positions
.. _`django-featured-item`: https://bitbucket.org/tim_heap/django-featured-item
Django Principals
=================
This module provides ``PrincipalField``, a model field for Django_ that allows
instances of a model to be defined as the principal instance for an entire model or
a collection of instances. When the status of one instance is changed, the status
of other items in the collection are updated in response as necessary.
Usage
-----
Add a ``PrincipalField`` to your model; that's it.
If you want to work with all instances of the model as a single collection,
there's nothing else required. To create collections based on one or more
fields on the model, specify the field names using the ``collection`` argument.
In general, the value assigned to a ``PrincipalField`` will be handled like a
unique Boolean value. Setting the principal to ``True`` will
cause all other items to become ``False``within the same collection --
unless, of course, the collection has fewer than two elements.
Multi-table model inheritance
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
By default, if a parent model has a principal field that declares a collection,
child model instances are filtered independently. This behavior can be changed
by specifying a `parent_link` argument identifying the name of the one-to-one
field linking the child model to the parent. If `parent_link` is set, all subclass
instances will be part of a single sequence in each collection.
Limitations
-----------
* Unique constraints can't be applied to ``PrincipalField`` because they break
the ability to update other items in a collection all at once. This one was
a bit painful, because setting the constraint is probably the right thing to
do from a database consistency perspective, but the overhead in additional
queries was too much to bear.
Credits
-------
This code loosely draws on concepts inspired by django-positions_ and django-featured-item_,
two projects which provide custom model fields with different functionality.
.. _`Django`: http://www.djangoproject.com/
.. _`django-positions`: https://github.com/jpwatts/django-positions
.. _`django-featured-item`: https://bitbucket.org/tim_heap/django-featured-item
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