Opened 4 years ago

Last modified 4 years ago

#31310 closed Cleanup/optimization

Wrong hint about recursive relationship — at Initial Version

Reported by: Matheus Cunha Motta Owned by: nobody
Component: Database layer (models, ORM) Version: dev
Severity: Normal Keywords:
Cc: Triage Stage: Ready for checkin
Has patch: yes Needs documentation: no
Needs tests: no Patch needs improvement: no
Easy pickings: yes UI/UX: no

Description

When there's more than 2 ForeignKeys pointing to the same model in an intermediary model of a m2m field and no through_fields have been set, Django will show an error with the following hint:

hint=(
    'If you want to create a recursive relationship, '
    'use ForeignKey("%s", symmetrical=False, through="%s").'

But to create a recursive relationship the ManyToManyField should be used instead of ForeignKey. Also symmetrical=False should only be used with m2m fields, according to model field reference (link: ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.0/ref/models/fields/#django.db.models.ManyToManyField.symmetrical). And more than that, setting symmetrical=False is not required for recursive relationships since Django >= 3.0.

This was probably a small mistake where the developer thought ManyToManyField but typed ForeignKey instead. And the symmetrical=False is an outdated requirement to recursive relationships, not applicable since 3.0. I'll provide a PR with a proposed correction shortly after.

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