Question

I am using Django’s authorization system to make accounts on my application.

What’s the best way at making a “friends” system using the authorization system? I want to be able to link the Users together, but they have to accept the friend request first, and I also want to hold the date they became friends.

Answer 1

An M2M field almost gets you there, but will only store the relationship, not the date it was created. It would be a lot simpler if you can manage without the friendship date.

Otherwise you’ll want to create a model something like this:

class Friendship(models.Model):
    created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True, editable=False)
    creator = models.ForeignKey(User, related_name="friendship_creator_set")
    friend = models.ForeignKey(User, related_name="friend_set")

You’ll want to create a method, probably on the user profile model to make sense of the relationships. Ideally, it should get you something like this:

>> User.userprofile.friends()
[{'name': "Joe", 'created': 2010-12-01},]