In Django - Model Inheritance - Does it allow you to override a parent model's attribute?

Question

I'm looking to do this:

class Place(models.Model):
 name = models.CharField(max_length=20)
 rating = models.DecimalField()

class LongNamedRestaurant(Place):  # Subclassing `Place`.
 name = models.CharField(max_length=255)  # Notice, I'm overriding `Place.name` to give it a longer length.
 food_type = models.CharField(max_length=25)

This is the version I would like to use (although I'm open to any suggestion): http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/models/#id7

Is this supported in Django? If not, is there a way to achieve similar results?

Answer 1

Django is Python. So yes.

Answer 2

Pasted your code into a fresh app, added app to INSTALLED_APPS and ran syncdb:

django.core.exceptions.FieldError: Local field 'name' in class 'LongNamedRestaurant' clashes with field of similar name from base class 'Place'

Looks like Django does not support that.

Answer 3

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.1/topics/db/models/#field-name-hiding-is-not-permitted

Answer 4

Maybe you could deal with contribute_to_class :

class LongNamedRestaurant(Place):

    food_type = models.CharField(max_length=25)

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(self, LongNamedRestaurant).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        name = models.CharField(max_length=255)
        name.contribute_to_class('name', self)

Syncdb works fine. I dont tried this example, in my case I just override a constraint parameter so ... wait & see !