How to query abstract-class-based objects in Django?

Question

Let\'s say I have an abstract base class that looks like this:

class StellarObject(BaseModel):
  title = models.CharField(max_length=255)
  description = mod         


        

Answer 1

I would consider moving away from either an abstract inheritance pattern or the concrete base pattern if you're looking to tie distinct sub-class behaviors to the objects based on their respective child class.

When you query via the parent class -- which it sounds like you want to do -- Django treats the resulting ojects as objects of the parent class, so accessing child-class-level methods requires re-casting the objects into their 'proper' child class on the fly so they can see those methods... at which point a series of if statements hanging off a parent-class-level method would arguably be a cleaner approach.

If the sub-class behavior described above isn't an issue, you could consider a custom manager attached to an abstract base class sewing the models together via raw SQL.

If you're interested mainly in assigning a discrete set of identical data fields to a bunch of objects, I'd relate along a foreign-key, like bx2 suggests.