On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 11:27 PM, NewSpire <newsp...@gmail.com> wrote: > First, this restriction is not there in the database. Auto-increment > fields do not have to be primary keys. Imposing this restriction > could cause a problem when trying to use legacy tables in a Django > environment. Is there a compelling reason for Django to impose this > restriction?
Django is optimized for the common case. Sure, it may well be that it's easy to accommodate uncommon cases as well, and when it's reasonable, we should definitely do so, but the reason it hasn't been up to this point is simply that not enough people need it. I highly doubt any of the core developers were actively seeking to restrict people from using non-primary-key auto-incrementing fields; Django was simply written to address the vastly most common need. > Second, is the use case where the primary key is not an AutoField but > the record insert order needs to be tracked. For instance, if the > primary key is a phone number or UUIDField it would be useful to also > have an AutoField so that records can be sorted in the order they were > inserted into the table. This is a real world problem I am faced with > right now. Call me crazy, but why would an AutoField help you with that? Since you later explain that the records are created in satellite systems, then aggregated, wouldn't you still run into problems ordering by something that's generated in isolation? It sounds like what you really want is a DateTimeField(default=datetime.datetime.now). That way, you get orderable fields that can be combined from any number of sources without worrying about collisions. Plus, you get the added bonus of having a real-world value that you can use for more than just ordering. Mind you, I'm not trying to say that a non-pk AutoField is a bad idea in itself. I'm just not convinced that this use case is a very good justification. -Gul --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers" group. To post to this group, send email to django-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
