django: manually adding a foreign key column (newcolumn_id_refs_id_4bfb2ece ?)
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05-07-2019 - |
Question
I need to add a foreign key field to an existing django model/postgres table. As per the django documentation, I ran the 'sqlall myapp' command to 'work out the difference'.
The obvious difference is that the table in question now has an extra column with a new contraint, which looks like this:
ALTER TABLE "myapp_mytable" ADD CONSTRAINT newcolumn_id_refs_id_4bfb2ece
FOREIGN KEY ("newcolumn_id") REFERENCES "myapp_theothertable" ("id")
DEFERRABLE INITIALLY DEFERRED;
Before messing with my database, I'd like to understand that statement, in particular, what does the last part of newcolumn_id_refs_id_4bfb2ece
refer to?
Thanks,
Martin
Solution
It will make PostgreSQL understand and enforce your foreign key to the other table and guarantee there won't be anything in myapp_table.newcolumn that can't be found in myapp_theothertable.id
Actually, your django app will work just fine even without that constraint. However, it's a good idea to have one in place, and if you do afterwards a dumpdata - loaddata -cycle, it will be created.