Django App Dependency Cycle

Question

I am in the middle of developing a Django application, which has quite complicated models (it models a university - courses, modules, lectures, students etc.)

I have

Answer 1

This may not be well-suited to your situation, but ignoring the Django aspect to your question, the general technique for breaking circular dependencies is to break out one of the cross-referenced items into a new module. For example:

moduleA: class1, class2
           |        ^
           v        |
moduleB: class3, class4

could become:

moduleC: class 3
           ^
           |
moduleA: class 1, class 2
                     ^
                     |
moduleB:          class 4

(Or alternatively, you could have broken class 2 out into its own module. Or both!)

Of course, this is no help if class A & B depend on each other. In that case, maybe they should be in the same module, or better still, maybe some part of these classes could be broken out into a third module, which both classes depend upon.