Question

No idea why this error is popping up. Here are the models I created –

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

class Shows(models.Model):
    showid= models.CharField(max_length=10, unique=True, db_index=True)
    name  = models.CharField(max_length=256, db_index=True)
    aka   = models.CharField(max_length=256, db_index=True)
    score = models.FloatField()

class UserShow(models.Model):
    user  = models.ForeignKey(User)
    show  = models.ForeignKey(Shows)

Here is the view from which I access these models –

from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.template import Context
from django.template.loader import get_template
from django.http import HttpResponse, Http404
from django.contrib.auth.models import User

def user_page(request, username):
    try:
        user = User.objects.get(username=username)
    except:
        raise Http404('Requested user not found.')

    shows     = user.usershow_set.all()
    template  = get_template('user_page.html')
    variables = Context({
        'username': username,
        'shows'   : shows})
    output = template.render(variables)
    return HttpResponse(output)

At this point I get an error –

OperationalError: (1054, “Unknown column ‘appname_usershow.show_id’ in ‘field list'”)

As you see this column is not even present in my models? Why this error?

Answer 1

As @inception said my tables schema had changed & running syncdb did not update already created tables.

Apparently any changes to the models when updated through syncdb does not change (as in update/modify) the actual tables. So I dropped the relevant DB & ran syncdb on empty DB. Now it works fine. 🙂

For others, SOUTH data migration tool for Django seems to be favorite option. It seems to provide options which django models & syncdb falls short on. Must check out…

Update 29th Sept 2019: From Django 1.7 upwards, migrations are built into the core of Django. If you are running a previous lower version of Django, you can find the repository on BitBucket.