How to customise models¶
This How-to describes how to replace Oscar models with your own. This allows you to add fields and custom methods. It builds upon the steps described in Customising Oscar. Please read it first and ensure that you’ve:
- Created a Python module with the the same app label
- Added it as Django app to
INSTALLED_APPS
- Added a
models.py
andadmin.py
Example¶
Suppose you want to add a video_url
field to the core product model. This means
that you want your application to use a subclass of
oscar.apps.catalogue.abstract_models.AbstractProduct
which has an additional field.
The first step is to create a local version of the “catalogue” app. At a minimum, this
involves creating catalogue/models.py
within your project and changing INSTALLED_APPS
to point to your local version rather than Oscar’s.
Next, you can modify the Product
model through subclassing:
# yourproject/catalogue/models.py
from django.db import models
from oscar.apps.catalogue.abstract_models import AbstractProduct
class Product(AbstractProduct):
video_url = models.URLField()
from oscar.apps.catalogue.models import *
Make sure to import the remaining Oscar models at the bottom of your file.
Tip
Using from ... import *
is strange isn’t it? Yes it is, but it needs to
be done at the bottom of the module due to the way Django registers models.
The order that model classes are imported makes a difference, with only the
first one for a given class name being registered.
The last thing you need to do now is make Django update the database schema and create a new column in the product table. We recommend using South migrations for this (internally Oscar already does this) so all you need to do is create a new schema migration.
It is possible to simply create a new catalogue migration (using ./manage.py
schemamigration catalogue --auto
) but this isn’t recommended as any
dependencies between migrations will need to be applied manually (by adding a
depends_on
attribute to the migration class).
The recommended way to handle migrations is to copy the migrations
directory
from oscar/apps/catalogue
into your new catalogue
app. Then you can
create a new (additional) schemamigration using the schemamigration
management command:
./manage.py schemamigration catalogue --auto
which will pick up any customisations to the product model.
To apply the migration you just created, all you have to do is run
./manage.py migrate catalogue
and the new column is added to the product
table in the database.
Customising Products¶
You should inherit from AbstractProduct
as above to alter behaviour for all
your products. Further subclassing is not recommended, because using methods
and attributes of concrete subclasses of Product
are not available unless
explicitly casted to that class.
To model different classes of products, use ProductClass
and
ProductAttribute
instead.
Model customisations are not picked up¶
It’s a common problem that you’re trying to customise one of Oscar’s models, but your new fields don’t seem to get picked up. That is usually caused by Oscar’s models being imported before your customised ones. Django’s model registration disregards all further model declarations.
In your overriding models.py
, ensure that you import Oscar’s models after
your custom ones have been defined. If that doesn’t help, you have an import
from oscar.apps.*.models
somewhere that is being executed before your models
are parsed. One trick for finding that import: put assert False
in the relevant
Oscar’s models.py, and the stack trace will show you the importing module.
If other modules need to import your models, then import from your local module, not from Oscar directly.