Advanced Django Models: Improve Your Python Development

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• getter/setter/deleter properties
• through model relationships
• Proxy models
• Wrap up

Introduction

Models are a core concept of the Django framework. According to Django’s design philosophies for models, we should be as explicit as possible with the naming and functionality of our fields, and ensure that we’re including all relevant functionality related to our model in the model itself, rather than in the views or somewhere else. If you’ve worked with Ruby on Rails before, these design philosophies won’t seem new as both Rails and Django implement the Active Record pattern for their object-relational mapping (ORM) systems to handle stored data. 

In this post we’ll look at some ways to leverage these philosophies, core Django features, and even some libraries to help make our models better.

getter/setter/deleter properties

As a feature of Python since version 2.2, a property’s usage looks like an attribute but is actually a method. While using a property on a model isn’t that advanced, we can use some underutilized features of the Python property to make our models more powerful. 

If you’re using Django’s built-in authentication or have customized your authentication using AbstractBaseUser, you’re probably familiar with the last_login field defined on the User model, which is a saved timestamp of the user’s last login to your application. If we want to use last_login, but also have a field named last_seen saved to a cache more frequently, we could do so pretty easily.

First, we’ll make a Python property that finds a value in the cache, and if it can’t, it returns the value from the database.

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