Hi,
I’m building a forum app in Django as a learning project.
I’m unsure of how to approach the creation of Post objects. I want users to be able to post threads (i.e. new topic), I want users to be able to post replies to those threads as well as replying to other replies.
I want to include features like reactions to posts, and replies.
I’d appreciate some feedback on the different approaches I’m considering:
My thinking is that, since the two types of posts are so similar, they should inherit common fields/methods from a parent class. I’m unsure how Django would represent that in the DB tbh. Intially this was an abstract class
class Post(models.Model):
post_body = models.TextField(max_length=2000)
publish_date = models.DateTimeField("date posted")
author = models.ForeignKey(User, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
class ThreadPost(Post):
post_title = models.Charfield(200)
is_solved = models.BooleanField("is_issue_solved", default=False)
class ReplyPost(Post):
is_solution = models.BooleanField("is_this_the_solution", default=False)
thread_post = models.ForeignKey(ThreadPost, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
Later I started using this, based on a stackoverflow response. However, I’m finding it a bit clunky to work with, as I often have to filter by whether a post is a thread or a reply, and have to find the thread which a post replies to. In that case, just having seperate classes seems more efficient. I do need to get better at querying etc.
class Post(models.Model):
post_title = models.CharField(max_length=200, blank=True, null=True)
post_body = models.TextField(max_length=2000)
publish_date = models.DateTimeField("date posted", auto_now_add=True)
author = models.ForeignKey(User, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
parent_post = models.ForeignKey('self', on_delete=models.CASCADE, null=True, blank=True, related_name='replies')
is_solved = models.BooleanField("is_issue_solved", default=False)
is_solution = models.BooleanField("is_this_the_solution", default=False)
def __str__(self):
return self.post_title or self.post_body[:30]
@property
def is_thread(self):
return self.parent_post is None
@property
def is_reply(self):
return self.parent_post is not None
class Reaction(models.Model):
REACTION_CHOICES = [
('thumbs_up', 'Thumbs Up'),
('thumbs_down', 'Thumbs Down'),
('laugh', 'Laugh'),
# ...
]
post = models.ForeignKey(Post, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
user = models.ForeignKey(User, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
reaction_type = models.CharField(max_length=20, choices=REACTION_CHOICES)
def __str__(self):
return f"{self.user.username} - {self.reaction_type}"
class Report(models.Model):
REPORT_CHOICES = [
('spam', 'Spam'),
('abusive', 'Abusive Content'),
# ...
]
post = models.ForeignKey(Post, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
user = models.ForeignKey(User, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
reason = models.CharField(max_length=20, choices=REPORT_CHOICES)
report_date = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
def __str__(self):
return f"{self.user.username} reported {self.post.id} for {self.reason}"
Finally, I could just have seperate unrelated Thread and Reply classes. I guess the issue with that is the code repitition and things like how other classes would interact with them. E.g. a Reaction class would need to account for the two unrelated Post types.
class ThreadPost(modesl.Model):
Title = models.Charfield(200)
body = models.TextField(max_length=2000)
publish_date = models.DateTimeField("date posted")
author = models.ForeignKey(User, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
is_solved = models.BooleanField("is_issue_solved", default=False)
class ReplyPost(models.Model):
body = models.TextField(max_length=2000)
publish_date = models.DateTimeField("date posted")
author = models.ForeignKey(User, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
threadpost = models.ForeignKey(ThreadPost, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
is_solution = models.BooleanField("is_this_the_solution", default=False)