[Django]-Django related_name for field clashes

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If a visit is a strong concept in your application, then it might make sense to have it the way you defined: visit consists of a ‘user user’ and a ‘user visitor’.

If, however, a visit is just a way in which users relate among themselves, then perhaps you should have a ManyToMany relation between users. For that purpose you should probably use ManyToManyField.symmetrical in a User Profile (in which you extend the information that comes with auth.models.User).

In any case, regarding the related_name, you may either disable the backwards relation if you won’t be accessing the visits from the user, or use a sensible name such as visits_to_self on user and visits_to_others on visitor, which would allow seeing who visited a user by calling user.visits_to_self and who the user visited by user.visits_to_others.

👤Miguel Ventura

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When you have a ForeignKey, it creates a property named with the model name plus _set to the referenced model. The problem here is that both foreign keys want to create a property on User named visit_set. The solution is to add related names that are different for each foreign key.

Usually, I use plurals for related names. In cases like these, I add an “as” clause to the related name:

class Visit(models.Model):
     user = models.ForeignKey(User, related_name="visitsAsUser")
     visitor = models.ForeignKey(User, related_name="visitsAsVisitor")

You don’t want a ManyToManyField unless you can have zero or more visitors per Visit, or users per Visit.

👤Mike DeSimone

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