I have a table known as messages. In my application, users can send different type of messages. Like forwarding an event, etc. As such, I have columns type and value in that table.
What I want to do is for a particular type, goto a particular table and make sure the value is valid (typically this maps to the id of that table). There could be multiple types, and each one has to be mapped to a different table. Is there a way to logically write this in the built in django ORM? Right now I’m only seeing this feasible if I use straight SQL, which I would rather not if I can get away with it…
Right now I’m doing something like:
Messages.objects.all().filter(Q(user_id=id))...etc
I want to add to the statement above checking the type and for the particular type, check the table associated with it.
It sounds like you have a “polymorphic association”. There are a couple ways to do analogous things in Django, but I think the one that most closely matches what you described is the contenttypes module, which uses separate columns for the type and for the value as in your application.