Question

I have a Django 1.4 site that uses the Django comments app. I’m upgrading my dev version to Django 1.5 and extending the User model – I have a Person model which extends AbstractBaseUser, and AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE = 'membership.Person' in my settings.

At the moment the django_comments postgresql database table has a column user_id which references auth_user(id):

"django_comments_user_id_fkey" FOREIGN KEY (user_id) REFERENCES auth_user(id) DEFERRABLE INITIALLY DEFERRED

There’s nothing in that column because, so far, there are no user accounts in the system, other than my own admin user. I think I need to update the table to refer to my new Person model (which is stored in the membership_person table). In the future users will be able to create accounts and post logged-in comments.

What ALTER TABLE command should I use to change django_comments to refer to my new Person model? I’ll have to do similar to the django_comment_flags table. Is there anything else I should watch out for?

Answer 1

I ended up doing this for the comments table:

ALTER TABLE django_comments DROP CONSTRAINT django_comments_user_id_fkey;
ALTER TABLE django_comments ADD CONSTRAINT django_comments_user_id_fkey FOREIGN KEY (user_id) REFERENCES membership_person(id) DEFERRABLE INITIALLY DEFERRED;

And similar for the comment flags table:

ALTER TABLE django_comment_flags DROP CONSTRAINT django_comment_flags_user_id_fkey;
ALTER TABLE django_comment_flags ADD CONSTRAINT django_comment_flags_user_id_fkey FOREIGN KEY (user_id) REFERENCES membership_person(id) DEFERRABLE INITIALLY DEFERRED;

Hopefully that does the job and doesn’t cause any problems. *crosses fingers*