[Django] Model design question: custom fields at runtime?

Question

Hi, I have some newbie questions about Django.

I want to write a generic ticket-management system, where the administrator of the site should be able to add custom fields to a ticket. It seems that the database tables are generated on initialization, so it is not clear to me how to add custom fields at runtime. One way is to have a long list of fields of different types, all nullable, and let the administrator rename/select the fields she needs. Is there a better design?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I'm currently in charge of maintaining a similar site where a treatment for a medical condition is listed and there can be arbitrary number of "cases" which are user-posted experiences for that treatment/condition combo attached.

The method my company used to set it up was to have an Entry object which would be analogous to the custom field you described, which has a Foreign Key referencing the treatment/condition to which it belongs.

Then when we want to get all the entries for a particular treatment/condition combo, we simply do an

Entry.objects.filter(condition=ID)

So, in your case, I would suggest having a Ticket model, and an "Entry" style model which contains a Foreign Key reference to the Ticket to which it belongs.