Generic many-to-many relationships

Question

I'm trying to create a messaging system where a message's sender and recipients can be generic entities. This seems fine for the sender, where there is only object to reference (GenericForeignKey) but I can't figure out how to go about this for the recipients (GenericManyToManyKey ??)

Below is a simplified example. PersonClient and CompanyClient inherit attributes from Client but have their own specific details. The last line is the sticking point. How do you allow message recipients to be a set of CompanyClients and PersonClients

  class Client(models.Model):
      city = models.CharField(max_length=16)

      class Meta:
          abstract = True

  class PersonClient(Client):
      first_name = models.CharField(max_length=16)
      last_name = models.CharField(max_length=16)
      gender = models.CharField(max_length=1)

  class CompanyClient(Client):
      name = models.CharField(max_length=32)
      tax_no = PositiveIntegerField()

  class Message(models.Model):
      msg_body = models.CharField(max_length=1024)
      sender = models.ForeignKey(ContentType)
      recipients = models.ManyToManyField(ContentType)

Answer 1

You can implement this using generic relationships by manually creating the junction table between message and recipient:

from django.db import models
from django.contrib.contenttypes import generic
from django.contrib.contenttypes.models import ContentType

class Client(models.Model):
    city = models.CharField(max_length=16)

    # These aren't required, but they'll allow you do cool stuff
    # like "person.sent_messages.all()" to get all messages sent
    # by that person, and "person.received_messages.all()" to
    # get all messages sent to that person.
    # Well...sort of, since "received_messages.all()" will return
    # a queryset of "MessageRecipient" instances.
    sent_messages = generic.GenericRelation('Message',
        content_type_field='sender_content_type',
        object_id_field='sender_id'
    )
    received_messages = generic.GenericRelation('MessageRecipient',
        content_type_field='recipient_content_type',
        object_id_field='recipient_id'
    )

    class Meta:
        abstract = True

class PersonClient(Client):
    first_name = models.CharField(max_length=16)
    last_name = models.CharField(max_length=16)
    gender = models.CharField(max_length=1)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return u'%s %s' % (self.last_name, self.first_name)

class CompanyClient(Client):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=32)
    tax_no = models.PositiveIntegerField()

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.name

class Message(models.Model):
    sender_content_type = models.ForeignKey(ContentType)
    sender_id = models.PositiveIntegerField()
    sender = generic.GenericForeignKey('sender_content_type', 'sender_id')
    msg_body = models.CharField(max_length=1024)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return u'%s...' % self.msg_body[:25]

class MessageRecipient(models.Model):
    message = models.ForeignKey(Message)
    recipient_content_type = models.ForeignKey(ContentType)
    recipient_id = models.PositiveIntegerField()
    recipient = generic.GenericForeignKey('recipient_content_type', 'recipient_id')

    def __unicode__(self):
        return u'%s sent to %s' % (self.message, self.recipient)

You'd use the above models like so:

>>> person1 = PersonClient.objects.create(first_name='Person', last_name='One', gender='M')
>>> person2 = PersonClient.objects.create(first_name='Person', last_name='Two', gender='F')
>>> company = CompanyClient.objects.create(name='FastCompany', tax_no='4220')
>>> company_ct = ContentType.objects.get_for_model(CompanyClient)
>>> person_ct = ContentType.objects.get_for_model(person1) # works for instances too.

# now we create a message:

>>> msg = Message.objects.create(sender_content_type=person_ct, sender_id=person1.pk, msg_body='Hey, did any of you move my cheese?')

# and send it to a coupla recipients:

>>> MessageRecipient.objects.create(message=msg, recipient_content_type=person_ct, recipient_id=person2.pk)
>>> MessageRecipient.objects.create(message=msg, recipient_content_type=company_ct, recipient_id=company.pk)
>>> MessageRecipient.objects.count()
2

As you can see, this is a far more verbose (complicated?) solution. I'd probably keep it simple and go with Prariedogg's solution below.