Where should django manager code live?

Question

This is a pretty simple django patterns question. My manager code usually lives in models.py, but what happens when models.py is really huge? Is there any other alternative patt

Answer 1

Your best bet with a large set of models is to use django modules to your advantage, and simply create a folder named models. Move your old models.py into this models folder, and rename it __init__.py. This will allow you to then separate each model into more specific files inside of this model folder.

You would then only need to import each model into your __init__.py's namespace.

So, for instance, you might want to separate it into:

yourapp/
    models/
        __init__.py # This file should import anything from your other files in this directory
        basic.py # Just an example name
        morespecificmodels.py # Just an example name
        managers.py # Might want to separate your manager into this

Then your __init__.py can just be:

from basic import * # You should replace * with each models name, most likely.
from managers import YourManager # Whatever your manager is called.

This is the structure that I use when my model files get huge, however I try to separate things into more pluggable apps as often as possible - so this is rarely used by me.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

I prefer to keep my models in models.py and managers in managers.py (forms in forms.py) all within the same app. For more generic managers, I prefer to keep them in core.managers if they can be re-used for other apps. In some of our larger apps with models/modelname.py that will contains a manager and the model code which doesn't seem bad.

Answer 3

I always place mine in managers.py. If you have a circular import issue remember that a) You can reference the model class for a manager at self.model, and b) You can do imports inside of functions.

Answer 4

What I did when building Django apps was to create a [modelname].py file with just the specific model code, manager code and sometimes form code and used an __init__.py file to import then all in the models directory. This helped me atleast in keeping it managable.