Suggestions for a django db structure
- by rh0dium
Hi
Say I have the unknown number of questions. For example:
Is the sky blue [y/n]
What date were your born on [date]
What is pi [3.14]
What is a large integ [100]
Now each of these questions poses a different but very type specific answer (boolean, date, float, int). Natively django can happily deal with these in a model.
class SkyModel(models.Model):
question = models.CharField("Is the sky blue")
answer = models.BooleanField(default=False)
class BirthModel(models.Model):
question = models.CharField("What date were your born on")
answer = models.DateTimeField(default=today)
class PiModel(models.Model)
question = models.CharField("What is pi")
answer = models.FloatField()
But this has the obvious problem in that each question has a specific model - so if we need to add a question later I have to change the database. Yuck. So now I want to get fancy - How do a set up a model where by the answer type conversion happens automagically?
ANSWER_TYPES = (
('boolean', 'boolean'),
('date', 'date'),
('float', 'float'),
('int', 'int'),
('char', 'char'),
)
class Questions(models.model):
question = models.CharField(()
answer = models.CharField()
answer_type = models.CharField(choices = ANSWER_TYPES)
default = models.CharField()
So in theory this would do the following:
When I build up my views I look at the type of answer and ensure that I
only put in that value.
But when I want to pull that answer back out it will return the data in the format specified by the answer_type. Example 3.14 comes back out as a float not as a str.
How can I perform this sort of automagic transformation? Or can someone suggest a better way to do this?
Thanks much!!
