How to store arbitrary name/value key pairs in a Django model?

Question

I have a fixed data model that has a lot of data fields.

class Widget(Models.model):
    widget_owner = models.ForeignKey(auth.User)
    val1 = models.CharField()
            


        

Answer 1

In my opinion, the best way to achieve this sort of completely extensible model is really with EAV (Entity, Attribute, Value). Its basically a way to bring a schemaless non-relational database to SQL. You can read a bunch more about it on wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-attribute-value_model but one of the better implementation of it in django is from the EveryBlock codebase. Hope it's a help!

http://github.com/brosner/everyblock_code/blob/master/ebpub/ebpub/db/models.py