Introduction

DRYNK: for DRY Natural Keys. To use Django natural keys, you end up repeating yourself. You have to define a natural_key method on the Model and a get_by_natural_key method on the Manager, but they both contain the same fields! With DRYNK, instead you add a single decorator to your model which takes care of everything.

The old way:

class Thing(models.Model):
	name = models.CharField(max_length=5, unique=True)
	some_data = models.IntegerField()
	
	objects = models.Manager()
	objects.get_by_natural_key = lambda self, x: return self.get(name=x)
	
	def natural_key(self):
		return self.name

But you've got DRYNK:

@with_natural_key(["name"])
class Thing(models.Model):
	name = models.CharField(max_length=50, unique=True)
	some_data = models.IntegerField()

Requirements and Installation

The project has no dependencies outside of Django itself. It works with Python 3.4 / 3.5 on Django 1.8 / 1.9.

Django 1.10 changed an internal API and I haven't had a chance to fix it. The django-mptt folks hit similar issues, so I should look at what they did: https://github.com/django-mptt/django-mptt/blob/master/docs/upgrade.rst#086

• pip install django-drynk
• Add from drynk import with_natural_key to your models.py file

Use

from django.db import models
from drynk import with_natural_key

@with_natural_key(["name"])
class Thing(models.Model):
	name = models.CharField(max_length=50, unique=True)
	some_data = models.IntegerField()

Also works with fields that are foreign keys, so long as those foreign objects also have a natural key.

from django.db import models
from drynk import with_natural_key

@with_natural_key(["name"])
class Kind(models.Model):
	name = models.CharField(max_length=10, unique=True)

@with_natural_key(["name", "kind"])
class Thing(models.Model):
	name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
	kind = models.ForeignKey(Kind)

Tests

./run-tests.sh.

Limitations

• Is opinionated: Believes it should be the default Manager and be called object.
• Probably breaks if you've already specified a manager, even by another name, on the model class.
• Requires Python3. I like the raise Exception from syntax and inspect.signature.

Contributions

I built this little project to satisfy a personal need, but thought it might be useful enough for others. If you have contributions, please don't hesitate to send a PR. Let's keep the tests passing and all will be well. My personal stack is currently Django 1.9 on Python 3.4, so that will be the most-tested. Travis will cover Django 1.8 and 1.9 on Python 3.4, 3.5, and nightly.