Hi everyone, As part of my planning for adding schema alteration/migrations into Django proper, I need to make a few changes to Fields to allow for better serialisation of model definitions (pretty much a requirement for any change-detecting migrations system).
In particular, I propose: - Requiring that all fields expose a method which says how to reconstruct them. Essentially, it returns the positional and keyword arguments you would have to pass into the constructor to make the field again (as there's no way to get them directly). For those familiar with south_field_triple, it would be a bit like that. There will have to be some restrictions on what can be returned as valid values - no values that are pre-made anonymous functions, for example - but that can be cleared up later. - Requiring all fields to be accessible by only their app label and class name/other unique name. This means either having to register custom fields (like admin classes, for example), or requiring fields to live in a fields.py or fields package (like models and models.py). This is to provide for a less-fragile way of referring to them than their full module path (which might change based on project name or package location). Neither of these two options is perfect - registration means a little more "boilerplate" code, while requiring them to be in a certain module is going to hurt apps that don't have them there already. For that reason, I prefer the registration approach - it will only be one extra line per field, it's a pattern already used for admin classes and filters/tags, and it will allow for field classes to be renamed while keeping the same registered name (if someone wants). I'd appreciate feedback on these general ideas - a more concrete API proposal will come later along with details about how I plan to approach the rest of the problem, but this is one of the few direct changes to Django's core and so needs dicussion first. Andrew -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers" group. To post to this group, send email to django-developers@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers?hl=en.
