django-deprecation

Deprecate django fields and make migrations without breaking existing code.

Install

pip install django-deprecation

Usage

TL;DR

# Before:
class Album(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)


# After:
class Album(models.Model):
    name = DeprecatedField('title')
    title = models.CharField(max_length=50)


assert album.name == album.title
assert list(Album.objects.filter(name='foo')) == list(Album.objects.filter(title='foo'))

Long explanation

Let's suppose we have the following models:

from django.db import models


class Musician(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)


class Album(models.Model):
    musician = models.ForeignKey(Musician, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)

Now, for some reason, let's suppose we want to rename the field Album#musician to Album#artist.

So we make the migration using the RenameField operation. The problem is that any existing code that used the old field would break.

We could create a property as an alias:

class Album(models.Model):
    artist = models.ForeignKey(Musician, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)

    @property
    def musician(self):
        return self.artist

    @musician.setter
    def musician(self, value):
        self.artist = value

But any code using QuerySet#filter would break if it uses the musician field.

This is where django-deprecation comes handy. We set the musician field as a DeprecatedField and point it to the artist field:

from django_deprecation import DeprecatedField


class Album(models.Model):
    artist = models.ForeignKey(Musician, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    musician = DeprecatedField('artist')
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)

Now, the following code snippet will work:

from .models import Album, Musician

album = Album.objects.first()
assert album.musician == album.artist

new_musician = Musician.objects.create(
    first_name='John',
    last_name='Doe',
    instrument='Guitar',
)
album.musician = new_musician
assert album.artist == new_musician

new_musician_album = Album.objects.filter(
    musician=new_musician,
).first()
new_artist_album = Album.objects.filter(
    artist=new_musician,
).first()
assert new_musician_album == new_artist_album

If you want to control how to report the error, replace the DeprecatedField.warn function with a custom one:

from django_deprecation import DeprecatedField


def warn_function(message):
    # do stuff
    import warnings
    warnings.warn(message, DeprecationWarning)


DeprecatedField.warn = warn_function

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