How do I tell Django to not create a table for an M2M related field?

Question

I\'m using this little jewel of a Django code snippet to edit a ManyToManyField from both directions:

class ManyToManyField_NoSyncdb(models.ManyToManyField):         


        

Answer 1

So, if you want to have access to the ManyToMany in both models in the Admin, currently the official solution is to use inlinemodel for the second model. I had also this same problem/need just a few days ago. And I was not really satisfied with the inlinemodel solution (heavy in DB queries if you have a lot of entries, cannot use the filter_horizontal widget, etc.).

The solution I found (that's working with Django 1.2+ and syncdb) is this:

class User(models.Model):
    groups = models.ManyToManyField('Group', through='UserGroups')

class Group(models.Model):
    users = models.ManyToManyField('User', through='UserGroups')

class UserGroups(models.Model):
    user_id = models.ForeignKey(User)
    group_id = models.ForeignKey(Group)

    class Meta:
        db_table = 'app_user_group'
        auto_created = User

See ticket 897 for more info.

Unfortunately, if you're using South you will have to remove the creation of the app_user_group table in every migration file created automatically.