Related Models

There are two Fields which represents relationaships between StdModel.

One-to-many relationships

The Position model in our example, contains two ForeignKey fields which represent relationships between the Position model and the Instrument model and between the Position model and the Fund model.

In the context of relational databases a foreign key is a referential constraint between two tables. For stdnet is exactly the same thing. The field store the id of a related StdModel instance.

Key Properties

• Behind the scenes, stdnet appends _id to the field name to create its field name in the back-end data-server. In other words the Position model will store in the backend an object with the following entries:

  {'instrument_id': ...,
   'fund_id': ...,
   'size': ...
   'dt': ...}

• The attribute of a ForeignKey can be used to access the related object. Using the router we created during registration we get a position instance:

  p = router.position.get(id=1)
  p.instrument    # an instance of Instrument
  

  The second statement is equivalent to:

  router.instrument.query().get(id=p.instrument_id)
  

  Note

  The loading of the related object is done, once only, the first time the attribute is accessed. This means, the first time you access a related field on a model instance, there will be a roundtrip to the backend server.

  Behind the scenes, this functionality is implemented by Python descriptors. This shouldn’t really matter to you, but we point it out here for the curious.

• Depending on your application, sometimes it makes a lot of sense to use the load_related query method to boost performance when accessing many related fields.

• When the object referenced by a ForeignKey is deleted, stdnet also deletes the object containing the ForeignKey unless the Field.required attribute of the ForeignKey field is set to False.

Many-to-many relationships

The ManyToManyField can be used to create relationships between multiple elements of two models. It requires a positional argument, the class to which the model is related.

Behind the scenes, stdnet creates an intermediary model to represent the many-to-many relationship. We refer to this as the through model.

Let’s consider the following example:

class Group(odm.StdModel):
    name = odm.SymbolField(unique=True)

class User(odm.StdModel):
    name = odm.SymbolField(unique=True)
    groups = odm.ManyToManyField(Group, related_name='users')

Both the User class and instances of if have the groups attribute which is an instance of A many-to-may stdnet.odm.related.One2ManyRelatedManager. Accessing the manager via the model class or an instance has different outcomes.

The through model

Custom through model

In most cases, the standard through model implemented by stdnet is all you need. However, sometimes you may need to associate data with the relationship between two models.

For these situations, stdnet allows you to specify the model that will be used to govern the many-to-many relationship and pass it to the ManyToManyField constructor via the through argument. Consider this simple example:

from stdnet import odm

class Element(odm.StdModel):
    name = odm.SymbolField()

class CompositeElement(odm.StdModel):
    weight = odm.FloatField()

class Composite(odm.StdModel):
    name = odm.SymbolField()
    elements = odm.ManyToManyField(Element, through=CompositeElement,
                                   related_name='composites')