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Multi-Column Primary Key support
Currently Django models only support single column primary keys. Support for multi-column primary keys would allow Django to better integrate with legacy databases (whose schema cannot be changed and have multi-column primary keys). There are a lot of details to get right here, but done right, it would allow for more flexibility in data modeling.
Current Status
Ticket 373: Add support for multiple-column primary keys Progress is stalled as there has been insufficient design discussion as to how this might be implemented.
Major Issues
Taken from Jacob's comment on Ticket 373 There are three basic problems in dealing with composite primary keys in Django.
- A number of APIs use "obj._meta.pk" to access the primary key field (for example, to do "pk=whatever" lookups). A composite PK implementation would need to emulate this in some way to avoid breaking everything.
- A number of things use (content_type_id, object_pk) tuples to refer to some object -- look at the comment framework, or the admin log API. Again, a composite PK system would need to somehow not break this.
- Admin URLs; they're of the form "/app_label/module_name/pk/"; there would need to be a way to map URLs to objects in the absence of a primary key.
Proposed Solutions
Proposed solutions for the admin URL issue: "/app_label/module/pk1,pk2/" -- does not support text primary keys which include a comma. "/app_label/module/pk1/pk2/" -- With support for a generic view on just "/pk1/" (like the date based generic view)
Alternative methods
Currently, you can "fake" it by declaring one of the keys to be primary in Django and adding a unique constraint to the model. (needs more info...examples?)
Links / Notes
http://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/373 Rails/ActiveRecord doesn't support this natively, but http://compositekeys.rubyforge.org/ is an add-on which does