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I'm using Django REST framework to serve up JSON content for a website front end. On the back end, I have two Django models, Player and Match, that each reference multiple of the other. A Match contains multiple Players, and a Player contains multiple Matches. This data is originally retrieved from a third-party API.

Matches and Players must be fetched separately from the API, and can only be fetched one at a time. When an object is fetched, its data is converted from the external JSON format into my Django model. At this point, the Match/Player will live forever in Django. The hard part is that I want this external fetching to be seamless. If I query for a player or match and it's in the DB, then just serve what we have there. Otherwise, I want to fetch that object from the external DB.

My question is, does Django provide any convenient way of handling this? Ideally, any query along the lines of Match.objects.get(id=...) will handle this API fallback transparently (I don't mind the fact that this query may take significantly longer in some cases).

marc_s
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Lucas Pickering
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1 Answers1

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If a way is "convenient" depends on your expectations ...

You could create a custom QuerySet where you override the get() method to include your fetch-from-API logic. Then you create a custom manager based on that QuerySet, like the docs show here. Finally add that custom manager to your model.

See also this question from 2011.

Ralf
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