The contenttypes frameworkLink para este cabeçalho

Django includes a contenttypes application that can track all of the models installed in your Django-powered project, providing a high-level, generic interface for working with your models.

Visão GeralLink para este cabeçalho

At the heart of the contenttypes application is the ContentType model, which lives at django.contrib.contenttypes.models.ContentType. Instances of ContentType represent and store information about the models installed in your project, and new instances of ContentType are automatically created whenever new models are installed.

Instances of ContentType have methods for returning the model classes they represent and for querying objects from those models. ContentType also has a custom manager that adds methods for working with ContentType and for obtaining instances of ContentType for a particular model.

Relations between your models and ContentType can also be used to enable “generic” relationships between an instance of one of your models and instances of any model you have installed.

Installing the contenttypes frameworkLink para este cabeçalho

The contenttypes framework is included in the default INSTALLED_APPS list created by django-admin startproject, but if you’ve removed it or if you manually set up your INSTALLED_APPS list, you can enable it by adding 'django.contrib.contenttypes' to your INSTALLED_APPS setting.

It’s generally a good idea to have the contenttypes framework installed; several of Django’s other bundled applications require it:

  • The admin application uses it to log the history of each object added or changed through the admin interface.

  • Django’s authentication framework uses it to tie user permissions to specific models.

The ContentType modelLink para este cabeçalho

class ContentTypeLink para esta definição

Each instance of ContentType has two fields which, taken together, uniquely describe an installed model:

app_labelLink para esta definição

The name of the application the model is part of. This is taken from the app_label attribute of the model, and includes only the last part of the application’s Python import path; django.contrib.contenttypes, for example, becomes an app_label of contenttypes.

modelLink para esta definição

The name of the model class.

Additionally, the following property is available:

nameLink para esta definição

The human-readable name of the content type. This is taken from the verbose_name attribute of the model.

Let’s look at an example to see how this works. If you already have the contenttypes application installed, and then add the sites application to your INSTALLED_APPS setting and run manage.py migrate to install it, the model django.contrib.sites.models.Site will be installed into your database. Along with it a new instance of ContentType will be created with the following values:

  • app_label will be set to 'sites' (the last part of the Python path django.contrib.sites).

  • model will be set to 'site'.

Methods on ContentType instancesLink para este cabeçalho

Each ContentType instance has methods that allow you to get from a ContentType instance to the model it represents, or to retrieve objects from that model:

ContentType.get_object_for_this_type(**kwargs)Link para esta definição

Takes a set of valid lookup arguments for the model the ContentType represents, and does a get() lookup on that model, returning the corresponding object.

ContentType.model_class()Link para esta definição

Returns the model class represented by this ContentType instance.

For example, we could look up the ContentType for the User model:

Code
>>> from django.contrib.contenttypes.models import ContentType
>>> user_type = ContentType.objects.get(app_label='auth', model='user')
>>> user_type
<ContentType: user>

And then use it to query for a particular User, or to get access to the User model class:

Code
>>> user_type.model_class()
<class 'django.contrib.auth.models.User'>
>>> user_type.get_object_for_this_type(username='Guido')
<User: Guido>

Together, get_object_for_this_type() and model_class() enable two extremely important use cases:

  1. Using these methods, you can write high-level generic code that performs queries on any installed model – instead of importing and using a single specific model class, you can pass an app_label and model into a ContentType lookup at runtime, and then work with the model class or retrieve objects from it.

  2. You can relate another model to ContentType as a way of tying instances of it to particular model classes, and use these methods to get access to those model classes.

Several of Django’s bundled applications make use of the latter technique. For example, the permissions system in Django’s authentication framework uses a Permission model with a foreign key to ContentType; this lets Permission represent concepts like “can add blog entry” or “can delete news story”.

O ContentTypeManagerLink para este cabeçalho

class ContentTypeManagerLink para esta definição

ContentType also has a custom manager, ContentTypeManager, which adds the following methods:

clear_cache()Link para esta definição

Clears an internal cache used by ContentType to keep track of models for which it has created ContentType instances. You probably won’t ever need to call this method yourself; Django will call it automatically when it’s needed.

get_for_id(id)Link para esta definição

Lookup a ContentType by ID. Since this method uses the same shared cache as get_for_model(), it’s preferred to use this method over the usual ContentType.objects.get(pk=id)

get_for_model(model, for_concrete_model=True)Link para esta definição

Takes either a model class or an instance of a model, and returns the ContentType instance representing that model. for_concrete_model=False allows fetching the ContentType of a proxy model.

get_for_models(*models, for_concrete_models=True)Link para esta definição

Takes a variadic number of model classes, and returns a dictionary mapping the model classes to the ContentType instances representing them. for_concrete_models=False allows fetching the ContentType of proxy models.

get_by_natural_key(app_label, model)Link para esta definição

Returns the ContentType instance uniquely identified by the given application label and model name. The primary purpose of this method is to allow ContentType objects to be referenced via a natural key during deserialization.

The get_for_model() method is especially useful when you know you need to work with a ContentType but don’t want to go to the trouble of obtaining the model’s metadata to perform a manual lookup:

Code
>>> from django.contrib.auth.models import User
>>> ContentType.objects.get_for_model(User)
<ContentType: user>

Relações genéricasLink para este cabeçalho

Adding a foreign key from one of your own models to ContentType allows your model to effectively tie itself to another model class, as in the example of the Permission model above. But it’s possible to go one step further and use ContentType to enable truly generic (sometimes called “polymorphic”) relationships between models.

For example, it could be used for a tagging system like so:

Code
from django.contrib.contenttypes.fields import GenericForeignKey
from django.contrib.contenttypes.models import ContentType
from django.db import models

class TaggedItem(models.Model):
    tag = models.SlugField()
    content_type = models.ForeignKey(ContentType, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    object_id = models.PositiveIntegerField()
    content_object = GenericForeignKey('content_type', 'object_id')

    def __str__(self):
        return self.tag

A normal ForeignKey can only “point to” one other model, which means that if the TaggedItem model used a ForeignKey it would have to choose one and only one model to store tags for. The contenttypes application provides a special field type (GenericForeignKey) which works around this and allows the relationship to be with any model:

class GenericForeignKeyLink para esta definição

There are three parts to setting up a GenericForeignKey:

  1. Give your model a ForeignKey to ContentType. The usual name for this field is “content_type”.

  2. Give your model a field that can store primary key values from the models you’ll be relating to. For most models, this means a PositiveIntegerField. The usual name for this field is “object_id”.

  3. Give your model a GenericForeignKey, and pass it the names of the two fields described above. If these fields are named “content_type” and “object_id”, you can omit this – those are the default field names GenericForeignKey will look for.

for_concrete_modelLink para esta definição

If False, the field will be able to reference proxy models. Default is True. This mirrors the for_concrete_model argument to get_for_model().

This will enable an API similar to the one used for a normal ForeignKey; each TaggedItem will have a content_object field that returns the object it’s related to, and you can also assign to that field or use it when creating a TaggedItem:

Code
>>> from django.contrib.auth.models import User
>>> guido = User.objects.get(username='Guido')
>>> t = TaggedItem(content_object=guido, tag='bdfl')
>>> t.save()
>>> t.content_object
<User: Guido>

If the related object is deleted, the content_type and object_id fields remain set to their original values and the GenericForeignKey returns None:

Code
>>> guido.delete()
>>> t.content_object  # returns None

Due to the way GenericForeignKey is implemented, you cannot use such fields directly with filters (filter() and exclude(), for example) via the database API. Because a GenericForeignKey isn’t a normal field object, these examples will not work:

Code
# This will fail
>>> TaggedItem.objects.filter(content_object=guido)
# This will also fail
>>> TaggedItem.objects.get(content_object=guido)

Likewise, GenericForeignKeys does not appear in ModelForms.

Reverse generic relationsLink para este cabeçalho

class GenericRelationLink para esta definição
related_query_nameLink para esta definição

The relation on the related object back to this object doesn’t exist by default. Setting related_query_name creates a relation from the related object back to this one. This allows querying and filtering from the related object.

If you know which models you’ll be using most often, you can also add a “reverse” generic relationship to enable an additional API. For example:

Code
from django.contrib.contenttypes.fields import GenericRelation
from django.db import models

class Bookmark(models.Model):
    url = models.URLField()
    tags = GenericRelation(TaggedItem)

Bookmark instances will each have a tags attribute, which can be used to retrieve their associated TaggedItems:

Code
>>> b = Bookmark(url='https://www.djangoproject.com/')
>>> b.save()
>>> t1 = TaggedItem(content_object=b, tag='django')
>>> t1.save()
>>> t2 = TaggedItem(content_object=b, tag='python')
>>> t2.save()
>>> b.tags.all()
<QuerySet [<TaggedItem: django>, <TaggedItem: python>]>

You can also use add(), create(), or set() to create relationships:

Code
>>> t3 = TaggedItem(tag='Web development')
>>> b.tags.add(t3, bulk=False)
>>> b.tags.create(tag='Web framework')
<TaggedItem: Web framework>
>>> b.tags.all()
<QuerySet [<TaggedItem: django>, <TaggedItem: python>, <TaggedItem: Web development>, <TaggedItem: Web framework>]>
>>> b.tags.set([t1, t3])
>>> b.tags.all()
<QuerySet [<TaggedItem: django>, <TaggedItem: Web development>]>

The remove() call will bulk delete the specified model objects:

Code
>>> b.tags.remove(t3)
>>> b.tags.all()
<QuerySet [<TaggedItem: django>]>
>>> TaggedItem.objects.all()
<QuerySet [<TaggedItem: django>]>

The clear() method can be used to bulk delete all related objects for an instance:

Code
>>> b.tags.clear()
>>> b.tags.all()
<QuerySet []>
>>> TaggedItem.objects.all()
<QuerySet []>

Defining GenericRelation with related_query_name set allows querying from the related object:

Code
tags = GenericRelation(TaggedItem, related_query_name='bookmark')

This enables filtering, ordering, and other query operations on Bookmark from TaggedItem:

Code
>>> # Get all tags belonging to bookmarks containing `django` in the url
>>> TaggedItem.objects.filter(bookmark__url__contains='django')
<QuerySet [<TaggedItem: django>, <TaggedItem: python>]>

If you don’t add the related_query_name, you can do the same types of lookups manually:

Code
>>> bookmarks = Bookmark.objects.filter(url__contains='django')
>>> bookmark_type = ContentType.objects.get_for_model(Bookmark)
>>> TaggedItem.objects.filter(content_type__pk=bookmark_type.id, object_id__in=bookmarks)
<QuerySet [<TaggedItem: django>, <TaggedItem: python>]>

Just as GenericForeignKey accepts the names of the content-type and object-ID fields as arguments, so too does GenericRelation; if the model which has the generic foreign key is using non-default names for those fields, you must pass the names of the fields when setting up a GenericRelation to it. For example, if the TaggedItem model referred to above used fields named content_type_fk and object_primary_key to create its generic foreign key, then a GenericRelation back to it would need to be defined like so:

Code
tags = GenericRelation(
    TaggedItem,
    content_type_field='content_type_fk',
    object_id_field='object_primary_key',
)

Note also, that if you delete an object that has a GenericRelation, any objects which have a GenericForeignKey pointing at it will be deleted as well. In the example above, this means that if a Bookmark object were deleted, any TaggedItem objects pointing at it would be deleted at the same time.

Unlike ForeignKey, GenericForeignKey does not accept an on_delete argument to customize this behavior; if desired, you can avoid the cascade-deletion by not using GenericRelation, and alternate behavior can be provided via the pre_delete signal.

Generic relations and aggregationLink para este cabeçalho

Django’s database aggregation API works with a GenericRelation. For example, you can find out how many tags all the bookmarks have:

Code
>>> Bookmark.objects.aggregate(Count('tags'))
{'tags__count': 3}

Generic relation in formsLink para este cabeçalho

The django.contrib.contenttypes.forms module provides:

class BaseGenericInlineFormSetLink para esta definição
generic_inlineformset_factory(model, form=ModelForm, formset=BaseGenericInlineFormSet, ct_field='content_type', fk_field='object_id', fields=None, exclude=None, extra=3, can_order=False, can_delete=True, max_num=None, formfield_callback=None, validate_max=False, for_concrete_model=True, min_num=None, validate_min=False, absolute_max=None, can_delete_extra=True)Link para esta definição

Returns a GenericInlineFormSet using modelformset_factory().

You must provide ct_field and fk_field if they are different from the defaults, content_type and object_id respectively. Other parameters are similar to those documented in modelformset_factory() and inlineformset_factory().

The for_concrete_model argument corresponds to the for_concrete_model argument on GenericForeignKey.

Generic relations in adminLink para este cabeçalho

O módulo django.contrib.contenttypes.admin provê GenericTabularInline e GenericStackedInline (subclasses de GenericInlineModelAdmin)

These classes and functions enable the use of generic relations in forms and the admin. See the model formset and admin documentation for more information.

class GenericInlineModelAdminLink para esta definição

The GenericInlineModelAdmin class inherits all properties from an InlineModelAdmin class. However, it adds a couple of its own for working with the generic relation:

ct_fieldLink para esta definição

The name of the ContentType foreign key field on the model. Defaults to content_type.

ct_fk_fieldLink para esta definição

The name of the integer field that represents the ID of the related object. Defaults to object_id.

class GenericTabularInlineLink para esta definição
class GenericStackedInlineLink para esta definição

Subclasses of GenericInlineModelAdmin with stacked and tabular layouts, respectively.