Welcome to django-polymorphic’s documentation!

Django-polymorphic simplifies using inherited models in Django projects. When a query is made at the base model, the inherited model classes are returned.

When we store models that inherit from a Project model...

>>> Project.objects.create(topic="Department Party")
>>> ArtProject.objects.create(topic="Painting with Tim", artist="T. Turner")
>>> ResearchProject.objects.create(topic="Swallow Aerodynamics", supervisor="Dr. Winter")

...and want to retrieve all our projects, the subclassed models are returned!

>>> Project.objects.all()
    [ <Project:         id 1, topic "Department Party">,
      <ArtProject:      id 2, topic "Painting with Tim", artist "T. Turner">,
      <ResearchProject: id 3, topic "Swallow Aerodynamics", supervisor "Dr. Winter"> ]

Using vanilla Django, we get the base class objects, which is rarely what we wanted:

>>> Project.objects.all()
    [ <Project: id 1, topic "Department Party">,
      <Project: id 2, topic "Painting with Tim">,
      <Project: id 3, topic "Swallow Aerodynamics"> ]

Features

  • Full admin integration.
  • ORM integration:
  • Support for ForeignKey, ManyToManyField, OneToOneField descriptors.
  • Support for proxy models.
  • Filtering/ordering of inherited models (ArtProject___artist).
  • Filtering model types: instance_of(...) and not_instance_of(...)
  • Combining querysets of different models (qs3 = qs1 | qs2)
  • Support for custom user-defined managers.
  • Uses the minimum amount of queries needed to fetch the inherited models.
  • Disabling polymorphic behavior when needed.

Indices and tables