Django Managers

I have been working with Django for more than a two years now and the more I learn about it the more it gets better. I do have a few hiccups but there are solutions for them, mostly. Any ways one thing I find very interesting is the model’s manager. Objects of a model, or a few objects, can be retrieved using these methods:

Model.objects.get()
Model.objects.filter()

Manager allows you to create such methods for your own Models. Let me give you an example. I have been working on a calendar app for a while and I have a model which looks like this:

class EventCalendar(models.Model):
    """Create calendar for every year use this for different levels or departments"""
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    academic_year = models.ForeignKey(AcademicYear)
    is_closed = models.BooleanField(default=False)
    is_default = models.BooleanField(default=False)

The is_closed boolean value tells me that the calendar is closed for adding events. Thus when I want to create a new event I should get just the list of calendars that is open. Thus I created a manager class:

class EventCalendarManager(models.Manager):
    def list_open(self):
        '''Lists all active or calendars on which events can be added.'''
        return self.filter(is_closed=False)

and added a line to my EventCalendar model objects = EventCalendarManager(). Thus the entire code would look like this:

The manager:

class EventCalendarManager(models.Manager):
    def list_open(self):
        '''Lists all active or calendars on which events can be added.'''
        return self.filter(is_closed=False)

The model:

class EventCalendar(models.Model):
    """Create calendar for every year use this for different levels or departments"""
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    academic_year = models.ForeignKey(AcademicYear)
    is_closed = models.BooleanField(default=False)
    is_default = models.BooleanField(default=False)
    objects = EventCalendarManager()

And now if I want to list down the calendars open for adding events all I need to do is:

cals = EventCalendar.objects.list_open()

I can similarly add a function to the manager class to return the default calendar and various other things. This has helped the way I implement my code. Hope you find this useful. Cheers!

Created on Sep 19 2011

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