Anything Else

Came across this comment:

Julian: what we did first was implementing just normal models in the models.py, but that always created the tables in the DB upon “syncdb” (which we deleted then and created views for). Actually I even wrote a patch for django where you can mark a model as “create_table=False” but the patch never made it in.

So we went another actually much better way, after discussing it a lot in the team. We simply did not create the models in models.py, which are used for syncdb but we create a file dbviews.py where we put the views’ models. This is very nice separation of code too.
The next step is writing the view itself, which we just did in pure SQL of course. I.e. if we have the model Forum and we want some specialized ForumActivity-view then we created a view “CREATE VIEW core_forumactivityview” (we are on mysql). We then fired that onto our DB and the model that matched it (make sure to use the same column names as the view does!!!) simply looks like this:

class ForumActiviy(models.Model):
    ….. all the fields
    class Meta:
        db_table = “core_forumactivityview”

now you can simply do

import project.core.dbviews

and they just look like models :-).
Depending on how you wrote the view you might even be able to update the data.

Smart! Learn about MySQL views here.