Related name for reverse access in Django - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Using Related Name for Reverse Access in Django Models

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple blog application where each Author can have multiple Post entries. You want to access all posts written by an author easily from the author object.

🎯 Goal: Create two Django models, Author and Post, where Post has a foreign key to Author with a related_name set. This will allow reverse access from an author to their posts using the related name.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a Django model called Author with a name field

Create a Django model called Post with a title field

Add a foreign key in Post to Author with related_name='posts'

Use the related_name to access all posts of an author

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

In many web applications, you need to model relationships between data, such as authors and their posts. Using related_name makes it easy to navigate these relationships in your code.

💼 Career

Understanding Django model relationships and reverse access is essential for backend developers working with Django to build scalable and maintainable web applications.

1

Create the Author model

Create a Django model called Author with a single field name which is a CharField with max length 100.

Django

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use models.CharField(max_length=100) for the name field.

2

Create the Post model with foreign key to Author

Create a Django model called Post with a title field as CharField max length 200, and add a foreign key field called author to the Author model with related_name='posts'.

Django

from django.db import models

class Author(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use models.ForeignKey with on_delete=models.CASCADE and related_name='posts'.

3

Access posts from an author using related_name

Write a Django ORM query to get all posts of an Author instance stored in variable author using the related_name posts. Assign the result to a variable called author_posts.

Django

from django.db import models

class Author(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)

class Post(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    author = models.ForeignKey(Author, on_delete=models.CASCADE, related_name='posts')

# Assume author is an Author instance
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the related_name posts on the author instance to get all posts.

4

Add __str__ methods for better display

Add a __str__ method to both Author and Post models that return the name and title fields respectively.

Django

from django.db import models

class Author(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)

class Post(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    author = models.ForeignKey(Author, on_delete=models.CASCADE, related_name='posts')

# Assume author is an Author instance
author_posts = author.posts.all()

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Define __str__ methods returning the main identifying field for each model.