Django circular model reference

Question

I\'m starting to work on a small soccer league management website (mostly for learning purposes) and can\'t wrap my mind around a Django models relationship. For simplicity,

Answer 1

Although there is nothing wrong with having two references to the same model, perhaps there is a better way to solve this particular problem.

Add a boolean to the Team model to identify a player + team combination as captain:

class Team(models.Model):
  player = models.ForeignKey(Player)
  name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
  is_captain = models.BooleanField(default=False)

To search for a team's captain:

Team.objects.filter(is_captain=True)

Personally I don't like this method because the search semantics don't make sense (ie, a "team" is not a "captain").

The other approach is to identify each player's position:

class Player(models.Model):
   name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
   position = models.IntegerField(choices=((1,'Captain'),(2,'Goal Keeper'))
   jersey = models.IntegerField()

   def is_captain(self):
     return self.position == 1

class Team(models.Model):
   name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
   player = models.ForeignKey(Player)

   def get_captain(self):
      return self.player if self.player.position == 1 else None

This makes a bit more sense when you search:

Player.objects.filter(position=1) (return all captains)

Team.objects.get(pk=1).get_captain() (return the captain for this team)

In either case, however you have to do some pre save checks to make sure there is only one player for a particular position.