CODEWITHSUNDEEP
django
Maximilian Kindshofer
Maximilian Kindshofer

Reputation: 2843

How to deal with users as foreign key and deletion

How do I deal with foreign keys like users or usernames that could one day be deleted?

My best guess would be a CharField with Choices limited to the Referennced Field, since deleting a ForeignKey would lead to cascade deletion.

I want to conserve eg the Name of the User related to the object even if the original User object was deleted.

Would something like this work:

def set_user_name(self):
    self.user_name = self.user.name
    return None

user = models.ForeignKey(User, 
                         blank=True, 
                         null=True, 
                         on_delete=models.SET(set_user_name))
user_name = models.CharField(max_length=50, blank=True, null=True)

Upvotes: 1

Views: 308

Answers (1)

Udi
Udi

Reputation: 30522

One of the common practices in relational databases is avoid deleting records that have (or might have) related entities and employ a "soft delete" pattern instead by adding an active = BooleanField(default=True) or deleted = BooleanField(default=False) field.

Django's built in User model has an is_active field that can be used for this purpose.

See more resources regarding soft delete in Django in the delete grid in djangopackages.org

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions