Is usage of many_to_one and one_to_many terms confusing for relation flags?

[Anssi Kääriäinen]

EDIT: we haven't mixed the terms up, I did that myself. The docs might need an update though.

It seems we have mixed up the naming of many_to_one and one_to_many. For example these references point out that ForeignKey is many_to_one: ​http://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSEPGG_8.2.0/com.ibm.db2.udb.doc/admin/c0004733.htm, ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/topics/db/examples/many_to_one/.

But in Django, ForeignKey is one_to_many.

I'm not going to mark this as accepted, as I always get confused with many-to-one and one-to-many. So, please do triage this carefully!

If at all possible I think we should use something that is less easy to get mixed up. I never recall how these terms should be interpreted, and I guess I am not alone here. Some ideas:

• Just is_multivalued flag: Check if field is one to many: "not field.is_multivalued and field.rel.is_multivalued"
• local_multivalued and remote_multivalued flags

My experience from ORM work is that the interesting thing to check is if the relation can have multiple values on the remote side. The local multi-valuedness isn't usually that interesting (although it might be in other contexts).

[Anssi Kääriäinen]

It seems I did the mixup based on the first sentence of Django's docs (which I guess is technically correct, you use ForeignKey to add the automatically created many-to-one relation), and table 3 of IBM's docs, the first line in there seems to be many-to-one, although the meaning of the header is that the relationships are many-to-one, but the direction the terms appear in the table can actually be one-to-many (nice!).

I'll mark this as invalid. I still do think the terms are confusing.