Change Poll model name in tutorial to Question

[anonymous]

having the project and the app both be called polls is not helpful. makes it awkward to read and understand for a new django user where exactly things are being put. how the directory / namespace structure fits together.

[Tim Graham]

I assume this is in reference to the tutorial, but the project there is called mysite so I'm not sure what this is asking for.

[Russell Keith-Magee]

I think the reporter is describing that a project called mysite, with an app called polls, with a model called Poll is asking for trouble -- it would be better to use a completely unrelated name like "survey" for the app, so you are talking about survey.Poll not polls.Poll, making it clear that it's not just a matter of pluralization.

I'm not saying survey is necessarily the best alternative name -- just pointing out that a name other than "polls" would be beneficial.

[Dima Kurguzov]

After the Two Scoops of Django book I prefer to name apps with a plural version of the main app's model if I don't see another more obvious option.
The polls app's name seems to be clear enough.

[Saul Shanabrook]

Many of my own apps share the same "problem", (i.e. artists.Artist, 'updates.Update'). I have found this to make sense when an app is really focused on a single model.

Do people consider this an antipattern that we don't want in the tutorial?

[Tim Graham]

I'm inclined to agree with the last two comments and "won't fix", but I'll leave open for another opinion given that Russ accepted the ticket.

[Russell Keith-Magee]

I also agree with the previous two comments, and I make use the "plural for app, singular for model" pattern in naming my own apps - but I still think the tutorial should be changed.

We're not talking about general usage here. We're talking about a tutorial. This is the user's first experience with Django. Removing any source of confusion is a good thing. As it currently stands, we're talking about Poll, poll, and polls, and they all refer to different things -- one keystroke difference between all three. It's trivial to misread, or to become confused as to which object you're using. Grammatically (English grammar, not Python), it makes complete sense to say polls.objects.get() - so why doesn't that work? After all, I just defined a Poll object, right? I make a poll, I retrieve from a list of polls, don't I?

Once you've established the basic app/model pattern, *then* you can start introducing the idea of using pluralization in names.

If we're not going to rename the polls app, it definitely warrants a pullout box that gives an overview of the naming scheme, drawing attention to the fact that there are three distinct objects here, all with different roles.

[Daniele Procida]

I agree that this is an issue. I think that the best solution is to follow the example of the Choicemodel, so that our two models at ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.5/intro/tutorial01/#creating-models will look like:

class Question(models.Model):
    question_text = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    pub_date = models.DateTimeField('date published')

class Choice(models.Model):
    poll = models.ForeignKey(Question)
    choice_text = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    votes = models.IntegerField(default=0)

[Rodolfo Sanchez]

I just made a pull request to this issue at ​https://github.com/django/django/pull/1574. The reason of this is that the patch file is too big to attach it in the ticket track.

[Tim Graham]

Please don't mark your own patch as Ready for checkin. Someone else needs to review it and do that.

[Tim Graham]

Review in progress.

[Rodolfo Sanchez]

Sorry, I did not see the stage of reviewing and I thought it was that.

[Rodolfo Sanchez]

the new images are in the pull request ​https://github.com/django/django/pull/1574.

[Tim Graham <timograham@…>]

In d34b94b00fa817871939ea6c097621a3e4a87311:

Fixed #20876 -- Changed Poll model name in tutorial to Question