Question

Initially, I started my UserProfile like this:

from django.db import models
from django.contrib.auth.models import User

class UserProfile(models.Model):
    user = models.OneToOneField(User)
    verified = models.BooleanField()
    mobile = models.CharField(max_length=32)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.user.email

Which works nicely along with AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE = 'accounts.UserProfile' set in settings.py.

However, I have two different kinds of users in my website, Individuals and Corporate, each having their own unique attributes. For instance, I would want my Individual users to have a single user only, hence having user = models.OneToOneField(User), and for Corporate I would want them to have multiple users related to the same profile, so I would have user = models.ForeignKey(User) instead.

So I thought about segregating the model into two different models, IndivProfile and CorpProfile, both inheriting from UserProfile while moving the model-specific attributes into the relevant sub-models. Seems like a good idea to me and would probably work, however I would not be able to specify AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE this way since I’m having two user profiles that would be different for different users.

I also thought about doing it the other way around, having UserProfile inherit from multiple classes (models), something like this:

class UserProfile(IndivProfile, CorpProfile):
    # some field

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.user.email

This way I would set AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE = 'accounts.UserProfile' and solve its problem. But that doesn’t look like it’s going to work, since inheritance in python works from left to right and all the variables in IndivProfile will be dominant.

Sure I can always have one single model with IndivProfile and CorpProfile variables all mixed in together and then I would use the required ones where necessary. But that is just doesn’t look clean to me, I would rather have them segregated and use the appropriate model in the appropriate place.

Any suggestions of a clean way of doing this?

Answer 1

I have done it this way.

PROFILE_TYPES = (
    (u'INDV', 'Individual'),
    (u'CORP', 'Corporate'),
)

# used just to define the relation between User and Profile
class UserProfile(models.Model):
    user = models.ForeignKey(User)
    profile = models.ForeignKey('Profile')
    type = models.CharField(choices=PROFILE_TYPES, max_length=16)

# common fields reside here
class Profile(models.Model):
    verified = models.BooleanField(default=False)

I ended up using an intermediate table to reflect the relation between two abstract models, User which is already defined in Django, and my Profile model. In case of having attributes that are not common, I will create a new model and relate it to Profile.