My last post talked about how to follow reverse generic relations efficiently. However, there's a further potential inefficiency in using generic relations, and that's the forward relationship.

If once again we take the example of an Asset model with a GenericForeignKey used to point at Articles and Galleries ...

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I've previously talked about how to make reverse lookups more efficient using a simple dictionary trick. Today I want to write about how this can be extended to generic relations.

At its heart, a generic relationship is defined by two elements: a foreign key to the ContentType table, to ...

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One of the requirements for the new Heart website we've just launched was to allow users to personalise their location to one of 33 radio stations across the country. For various reasons, this meant rewriting all the links on the page, dynamically, depending on the user's location setting ...

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One of the main sources of unnecessary database queries in Django applications is reverse relations.

By default, Django doesn't do anything to follow relations across models. This means that unless you're careful, any relationship can lead to extra hits on the database. For instance, assuming MyModel has a ...

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Inspired by the graphical cheat sheet here, I've recently moved over to Vim as my main development environment.

After installing a whole range of plugins, I found that one of them, taglist, no longer worked with my Django code. The reason was that something was changing the filetype of ...

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At work we've been using Haystack to manage our site search, with a Solr backend.

As usual, we're customising things quite a lot - using faceted queries and weighted indexes, and bypassing the built-in search forms - so I wanted to be sure, in line with my general obsession with ...

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One of the things I wanted to do with this blog was to cover some of the design patterns I've discovered/come across/stolen over the years I've been working with Django. So this is the first in what I hope will be a long-running series on Django ...

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We've been using django-MPTT at work for quite a while. It's a great way to manage hierarchical data in a read-efficient way, and we use it heavily in our CMS application. I'll definitely be talking about it further in future posts.

Recently we moved our database migrations ...

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This is intended to be primarily a technical blog, so I was keen to get the presentation of code snippets correct. I'm a - shall we say - fairly frequent answerer on StackOverflow, and I've got used to their Markdown-enabled edit box. Luckily, the Mingus basic-blog application allows a choice ...

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This blog is built using Kevin Fricovsky's excellent django-mingus project, which is mainly a set of standard pre-existing reusable apps with some templates and a bit of glue to hold it together.

Although it's quite usable out of the box, I found - inveterate hacker that I am - that ...

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