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Cool New django-taggit API

A little while ago I wrote about some of the issues with the reusable application paradigm in Django. Yesterday Carl Meyer pinged me about an issue in django-taggit, it uses an IntegerField for the GenericForeignKey, which is great. Except for when you have a model with a CharField, TextField, or anything else for a primary key. The easy solution is to change the GenericForeignKey to be something else. But that’s lame, a pain in the ass, and a hack (more of a hack than a GenericForeignKey in the first place).

The alternate solution we came up with:

from django.db import models

from taggit.managers import TaggableManager
from taggit.models import TaggedItemBase


class TaggedFood(TaggedItemBase):
    content_object = models.ForeignKey('Food')

class Food(models.Model):
    # ... fields here

    tags = TaggableManager(through=TaggedFood)

Custom through models for the taggable relationship! This let’s the included GenericForeignKey implementation cater to the common case of integer primary keys, and lets other people provide their own implementations when necessary. Plus it means doing things like, adding a ForeignKey to auth.User or adding the “originally” typed version of the tag (for systems where tags are normalized).

In addition I’ve finally added some docs, they aren’t really complete, but they’re a start. I’m planning a release for sometime next week, unless some major issue pops up.