Design question?

Question

I am building music app, where user can do several tasks including but not limited to listening song, like song, recommend song to a friend and extra. currently I have this model:

class Activity(models.Model):
    activity = models.TextField()
    user = models.ForeignKey(User)
    date = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=True)

so far I thought about two solutions. 1. saving a string to database. e.g "you listened song xyz". 2. create a dictionary about the activity and save to the database using pickle or json.

e.g.

dict_ = {"activity_type":"listening", "song":song_obj}

I am leaning to the second implementation, but not quite sure.

so what do you think about those two methods? do you know better way to achieve the goal?

Answer 1

Looks like all you need is an enumeration to match a table in your database.

So in your UserActivity table, you will have userid, activityid, songid, datetime etc etc

Answer 2

What about GenericForeignKey? You could have userid, activityid and content_object on your UserActivity where content_object is a song, an user or something completely different.

content_type = models.ForeignKey(ContentType)
object_id = models.PositiveIntegerField()
content_object = generic.GenericForeignKey('content_type', 'object_id')