Django: “Soft” ForeignField without database integrity checks

Question

I have a Django project that has multiple django \"apps\". One of them has models to represent data coming from an external source (I do not control this data).

I want m

Answer 1

Piggybacking off of marianobianchi's comment, one of the options for ForeignKey.on_delete is

DO_NOTHING: Take no action. If your database backend enforces referential integrity, this will cause an IntegrityError unless you manually add a SQL ON DELETE constraint to the database field (perhaps using initial sql).

This combined with disabling foreign key constraints at the db level should do the trick. From what I can tell, there are two ways of doing this. You could disable fk constraints entirely like this:

from django.db.backend.signals import connection_created
from django.dispatch import receiver

@receiver(connection_created)
def disable_constraints(sender, connection):
    connection.disable_constraint_checking()

It looks like the django db backends offer a constraint_checks_disabled context manager, too, so you could wrap the relevant db accesses in code like this to avoid disabling the checks throughout:

from django.db import connection
with connection.constraint_checks_disabled():
    do_stuff()