Use dataclasses to represent models

[adsharma]

Django documentation and current practice are described in this example:

​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.2/intro/tutorial02/#creating-models

This has a number of limitations:

• Python's type checkers don't understand models.CharField and models.DateTimeField
• They do understand python strings and datetime objects
• There is some activity on typing-sig about teaching them more about lengths and limits

dataclasses introduced in 3.7 are seeing some adoption.

The same example can be represented as:

​https://github.com/adsharma/fquery/pull/2

This is more ergonomic for python programmers trained on dataclasses.

Queries against these dataclasses can be expressed in one of two ways:

• A method chaining API such as:

​https://github.com/adsharma/fquery/blob/main/tests/test_operators.py

• SQL via ActiveRecord or DataMapper

​https://github.com/adsharma/dataclasses-sql/blob/master/tests/test_decorators.py

For this to work as well as current django models, two things need to happen:

• How to pass additional metadata about database schema? (dataclasses support metadata, perhaps make it more ergonomic?)
• What to do about indices, views and other db concepts

One school of thought is to use SQL DDL.

Some conversation on this topic here:

​https://twitter.com/arundsharma/status/1390898932713066499

Would love to hear more from the django community on the topic.

[Mariusz Felisiak]

Thanks for the proposition, however I don't think it needs to be built-in into Django it sounds like a third-party package is the best way to proceed.

By the way, you'll reach a wider audience if you write to the DevelopersMailingList about your ideas, see ​Requesting features.