Opened 10 years ago

Closed 10 years ago

Last modified 10 years ago

#24289 closed Bug (fixed)

Is usage of many_to_one and one_to_many terms confusing for relation flags? — at Version 1

Reported by: Anssi Kääriäinen Owned by: nobody
Component: Database layer (models, ORM) Version: 1.8alpha1
Severity: Release blocker Keywords:
Cc: Loic Bistuer, pirosb3, cmawebsite@… Triage Stage: Ready for checkin
Has patch: yes Needs documentation: no
Needs tests: no Patch needs improvement: no
Easy pickings: no UI/UX: no

Description (last modified by Anssi Kääriäinen)

EDIT: we haven't mixed the terms up, I did that myself. The docs might need an update though.

It seems we have mixed up the naming of many_to_one and one_to_many. For example these references point out that ForeignKey is many_to_one: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSEPGG_8.2.0/com.ibm.db2.udb.doc/admin/c0004733.htm, https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/topics/db/examples/many_to_one/.

But in Django, ForeignKey is one_to_many.

I'm not going to mark this as accepted, as I always get confused with many-to-one and one-to-many. So, please do triage this carefully!

If at all possible I think we should use something that is less easy to get mixed up. I never recall how these terms should be interpreted, and I guess I am not alone here. Some ideas:

  • Just is_multivalued flag: Check if field is one to many: "not field.is_multivalued and field.rel.is_multivalued"
  • local_multivalued and remote_multivalued flags

My experience from ORM work is that the interesting thing to check is if the relation can have multiple values on the remote side. The local multi-valuedness isn't usually that interesting (although it might be in other contexts).

Change History (1)

comment:1 by Anssi Kääriäinen, 10 years ago

Description: modified (diff)
Resolution: invalid
Status: newclosed
Summary: ForeignKey is many_to_one, not one_to_manyIs usage of many_to_one and one_to_many terms confusing for relation flags?

It seems I did the mixup based on the first sentence of Django's docs (which I guess is technically correct, you use ForeignKey to add the automatically created many-to-one relation), and table 3 of IBM's docs, the first line in there seems to be many-to-one, although the meaning of the header is that the relationships are many-to-one, but the direction the terms appear in the table can actually be one-to-many (nice!).

I'll mark this as invalid. I still do think the terms are confusing.

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