thomlinton / django-enummodel

A Django application to bridge the gap between using enumerations and having fully-specified, normalized data models.

Introduction

django-enummodel is a small utility application designed to help bridge the niche use case(s?) between defining enumerations for a given field (mutually exclusive options) and fully specifying non-exclusive options as instances of a fully specified model type.

In the common case, non-mututally exclusive options configured as a fully specified model (along with a fixture to store those options) can, in the best case, 'just work'; in the worst case, it can provide mild headaches, notably when lazy translations are involved.

In the particular case of the author, the challenge was to avoid having to cope with a O(n) growth rate of fixtures to manage, coupled with the desire to avoid encountering issues of internationalization and being forced to choose a particular character set in which to store these values.

django-enummodel provides a Django Model object with which the developer may extend to provide the functionality sketched above:

LANGUAGE_CHOICES = (
    (1,_(u'English')),
    (2,_(u'Spanish')),
    (3,_(u'French')),

    (255,_(u'other')),
)

class Language(EnumModel):
    class EnumMeta:
        choices = LANGUAGE_CHOICES

Please note that that population of any model derived from EnumModel takes place after schema migration; therefore, changes to the choices basis will need to be rectified by running:

django-admin.py migrate

or:

django-admin.py migrate app_name