Question

I have a model, News, that has a ForeignKey to another model, Category.
The categories are defined with id, name, slug and a few more parameters.
My categories will never change in the future, so I am wondering why have I to store them in the database.
Is there any way to hardcode them inside the code, like using the choices or any other technique?

Answer 1

yes, choices: store pairs of ID+name as a tuple of tuples and in another structure any other parameters.

CATEGORIES = (
    (1, "Some category"),
    (2, "Another category"),
)

CATEGORIES_PARAMS = {
    1: {'slug': 'param_value'},
    2: {'slug': 'another_value'},
}


class News(models.Model):
    category = models.IntegerField("category", choices=CATEGORIES)
    ...

then you can use other params following way:

CATEGORIES_PARAMS[news_instance.category]['slug']

or create simple wrapper class:

class Category(object):
    def __init__(self, id):
        self.id = id

    def __getattr__(self, attr):
        return CATEGORIES_PARAMS[self.id][attr]


cat = Category(news_instance.category)
print(cat.slug)