Saturday, February 21, 2015

235 stale controllables

I am investigating what to do with the 235 stale controllables in Eupen.

In lino.modlib.contenttypes, I changed StaleControllables to StaleGenericRelateds and StaleControllablesByModel to StaleGenericRelatedByModel. They no longer detect only stale owner fields of Controllable rows but any stale GenericForeignKey field in the database.

Added a new test module for testing this table: test_stale_gfk.

Which made me discover that when I delete an object, Django does automatically delete any objects which have a GenericForeignKey pointing at it as well. Already in 1.6.

So theoretically I can remove my custom Model.delete method which did exactly that. I have been reinventing the wheel once more. And I am going to adapt Lino to Django. Yes (sigh!), that’s the disadvantage of being a poor lonesome codeboy.

One problem is that in Lino you can configure the cascading behaviour using the allow_stale_generic_foreignkey. Okay, in Django you can write a pre_delete signal.

Another problem is that in Lino you can inform the user and ask for confirmation before deleting them.

Another problem is that in Django this automatism happens only if the object being deleted has a GenericRelation field. Which is confirmed by Why won’t my GenericForeignKey cascade when deleting?. OTOH this statement seems to be wrong: it happens also in my projects which do not use any GenericRelation. As test_broken_gfk shows.

Which means that Change objects are currently not preserved if their master or object pointer becomes stale. See #30 (Keep change records when partner gets deleted). I must probably write a signal handler for pre_delete. A minor problem, though. Clear nullable foreign keys on delete.

All this raises the question: How then did these stale generic pointers get into the database in Eupen? Okay, I can imagine that if some bug in some user code raises an exception at the right (i.e. the wrong) moment.

And last but not least:

  • how then can I artificially produce some stale GenericRelated objects for testing purposes?

  • how to clean up these?

About Journals and Invoices

While working on #9, Mahmoud correctly pointed out that there were some redundant table definitions in lino.modlib.trading and lino.modlib.ledger.