Better Django choices

A typical Django model looks something like this:

from django.db import models


class MyModel(models.Model):
    STATUS_CHOICES = (
        (1, "Active"),
        (2, "In-Progress"),
        (-1, "Inactive"),
    )
    status = models.SmallIntegerField(choices=STATUS_CHOICES, default=1)

    def __str__(self):
        return '{}'.format(self.pk)

To filter on "status", one would do this

MyModel.objects.filter(status=1)

Not only is hardcoding non-informative in this case, anyone reading or writing a filter has to refer to the Model every time. In the two fairly large Django codebases that I have worked on, there was a mapping system that would let you do this.

MyModel.objects.filter(status=STATUS_MAP["Active"])

This gives better context to someone reading the code. Authors, on the other hand, still need to hardcode a string.

"There must be a better way"

Sure there is, a quick search will lead you to this.

One can pip install django-choices and call it a day. To me, this problem seems too trivial to require a dependency.

More searching will lead you to this. What I suggest is a mix of both, with some restructuring.

Create a directory named "choices" in the app's folder. For each model in your app, add a file in this directory (for "MyModel", you can add "mymodel.py").

For each field with choices, you define a class (with the same name capitalised).

class Status:
    ACTIVE = 1
    IN_PROGRESS = 2
    INACTIVE = -1

    choices = (
        (ACTIVE, "Active"),
        (IN_PROGRESS, "In-Progress"),
        (INACTIVE, "Inactive"),
    )

MyModel will be updated likewise. An extra property of the form <model_name><capitalised_field_name> is added. You can, and probably should, experiment with the naming conventions here.

from django.db import models

from .choices import mymodel


class MyModel(models.Model):
    MyModelStatus = mymodel.Status
    status = models.SmallIntegerField(choices=MyModelStatus.choices,
                                      default=MyModelStatus.ACTIVE)

    def __str__(self):
        return '{}'.format(self.pk)

Filtering will be thus:

MyModel.objects.filter(status=MyModel.MyModelStatus.ACTIVE)

There's several enhancements you can make to the "Status" class. Such as creating a base that auto-defines "choices", gives default values, etc. This does the job without adding much overhead. It is slightly verbose, but I'd take that any day for improved readability. Authors will also benefit from autocomplete in supporting editors and IDEs.

For those who might consider refactoring an existing codebase, you can run "makemigrations" to test it out. If you did everything correctly, no changes will be detected when you run "python manage.py makemigrations".

Making changes to production systems however, based on the latest blog posts that you read, is a risk that is yours to take :)