While working on my Django-based projects I’m always trying to follow Django’s approach to reusable apps – I’m trying to decouple my applications from each other and especially trying to avoid cross references but sometimes it does not seem to be possible.
Let’s consider a simple example with 2 applications: articles and users. Articles application defines article model, articles list view and single article view, users application defines user model and user profile view. Article is referencing user from the author field, so articles application is obviously dependent on users application which is fine.
But when it comes to user profile, I want to display latest articles authored by the user (and may be latest articles viewed by the user) on that page but that makes users application aware of articles application which is what I’m trying to avoid.
I can obviously try to push all such references to the template level but it still does not solve the issue completely and at the same time may be very inefficient in terms of database queries sometimes.
What do you guys do in such cases?
If you are really set on not having any conversation between the ‘user’ app and the ‘article’ app, then you need a third app to act as interface. That would know about users and articles and define all the coupling between them. Your article view would be in there, since it has to get the user data, and your user profile view would be in there, because it needs to say “Fred wrote 5 articles”.
Whether this level of decoupling is worth it, I don’t know. Sometimes programming for re-usability gets in the way of making the thing usable in the first place.