Question

1. Why would I create a recursive relationship?

    aField = models.ForeignKey('self')

2. Is this the same with the above?

        class aClass(models.Model):  
        aField = models.ForeignKey('aClass')

Answer 1

1. You may need to create a recursive relationship when you would like to have parent and child nodes with identical model structure. For example if you have comments with text, data and user_id:

   class Comment( models.Model ):
       text = models.TextField()
       create_date_time = models.DateTimeField()
       parent_comment = models.ForeignKey( 'self' )
   

2. I think yes (you can try to test it) but it’s not a good form. If you change a class name then you must change the string value in brackets. If you use ‘self’ you haven’t this headache.