Polymorphism in Django

Question

I have the following models. How do I get access to the unicode of the inheriting tables (Team and Athete) from the Entity table? I\'m trying to display a l

Answer 1

I don't believe you have to do anything. If Entity is never instantiated directly, you will never call the non-existent Entity.__unicode__ method. However, if you'd like to play it save, you could add a stub method in your Entity class:

class Entity(models.Model):

    def __unicode__(self):
        pass

class Team(Entity):

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.name

class Athlete(Entity):

    def __unicode__(self):
        return '%s %s' % (self.firstname, self.lastname)

You are now assured that any class which inherits from Entity will have a __unicode__ method, and you can simply traverse them:

for thing in [TeamA(), AthleteA(), TeamB(), AthleteB()]:
    print unicode(thing)