id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc	stage	has_patch	needs_docs	needs_tests	needs_better_patch	easy	ui_ux
6725	model-api documentation should note model inheritance should not be used	calvins	nobody	"I was told in the IRC channel that model inheritance is known to be broken at the moment and is not supposed to work. 

The primary documentation page, [http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/model-api/ ""Django | Model reference | Django Documentation""], does not note that it should not be used. 

In the ""basics"" bullet points of that page, the first point is: ""Each model is a Python class that subclasses django.db.models.Model."" That would be the logical point to put a boldface warning that you can't extend any model types that extend models.Model and friends. You might want to link to [http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/IrcFAQ#ModelSubclassing ""IRCFAQ How do I extend a model?""] and/or [http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/ModelInheritance ""Model Inheritance""].

It would be nice too if django gave a warning (perhaps only at verbosity=2) when the user does this and tries to use either loaddata or dumpdata (or any other db-related manage.py functions), since a user that knows the model-api reasonably well might not check the documentation until they've spent a long time trying to figure out why some of their objects don't get serialized at all using dumpdata. In my case, I had a trivial sub-type of a model that I had defined (literally ""class Archived_Item(Item): pass""), and spent a long time trying to figure out why just 1 object was not serialized using dumpdata, which caused problems when loaddata is run (where I originally thought the problem was)."		closed	Documentation	0.96		wontfix	documentation model inheritance		Unreviewed	0	0	0	0	0	0