What is the most efficient way to store a list in the Django models?

Question

Currently I have a lot of python objects in my code similar to the following:

class MyClass():
  def __init__(self, name, friends):
      self.myName = name
         


        

Answer 1

In case you're using postgres, you can use something like this:

class ChessBoard(models.Model):

    board = ArrayField(
        ArrayField(
            models.CharField(max_length=10, blank=True),
            size=8,
        ),
        size=8,
    )

if you need more details you can read in the link below: https://docs.djangoproject.com/pt-br/1.9/ref/contrib/postgres/fields/

Answer 2

My solution, may be it helps someone:

import json
from django.db import models


class ExampleModel(models.Model):
    _list = models.TextField(default='[]')

    @property
    def list(self):
        return json.loads(self._list)

    @list.setter
    def list(self, value):
        self._list = json.dumps(self.list + value)

Answer 3

You can store virtually any object using a Django Pickle Field, ala this snippet:

http://www.djangosnippets.org/snippets/513/

Answer 4

A simple way to store a list in Django is to just convert it into a JSON string, and then save that as Text in the model. You can then retrieve the list by converting the (JSON) string back into a python list. Here's how:

The "list" would be stored in your Django model like so:

class MyModel(models.Model):
    myList = models.TextField(null=True) # JSON-serialized (text) version of your list

In your view/controller code:

Storing the list in the database:

import simplejson as json # this would be just 'import json' in Python 2.7 and later
...
...

myModel = MyModel()
listIWantToStore = [1,2,3,4,5,'hello']
myModel.myList = json.dumps(listIWantToStore)
myModel.save()

Retrieving the list from the database:

jsonDec = json.decoder.JSONDecoder()
myPythonList = jsonDec.decode(myModel.myList)

Conceptually, here's what's going on:

>>> myList = [1,2,3,4,5,'hello']
>>> import simplejson as json
>>> myJsonList = json.dumps(myList)
>>> myJsonList
'[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, "hello"]'
>>> myJsonList.__class__
<type 'str'>
>>> jsonDec = json.decoder.JSONDecoder()
>>> myPythonList = jsonDec.decode(myJsonList)
>>> myPythonList
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, u'hello']
>>> myPythonList.__class__
<type 'list'>

Answer 5

Remember that this eventually has to end up in a relational database. So using relations really is the common way to solve this problem. If you absolutely insist on storing a list in the object itself, you could make it for example comma-separated, and store it in a string, and then provide accessor functions that split the string into a list. With that, you will be limited to a maximum number of strings, and you will lose efficient queries.

Answer 6

Would this relationship not be better expressed as a one-to-many foreign key relationship to a Friends table? I understand that myFriends are just strings but I would think that a better design would be to create a Friend model and have MyClass contain a foreign key realtionship to the resulting table.