Skip to content
Back to top
View this page
Edit this page

# Managers & Querysets

## Using a Custom Manager

A nice feature of Django is the possibility to define one’s own custom object managers. This is fully supported with django-polymorphic. For creating a custom polymorphic manager class, just derive your manager from `PolymorphicManager` instead of `Manager`. As with vanilla Django, in your model class, you should explicitly add the default manager first, and then your custom manager:

    from polymorphic.models import PolymorphicModel
    from polymorphic.managers import PolymorphicManager

    class TimeOrderedManager(PolymorphicManager):
        def get_queryset(self):
            qs = super(TimeOrderedManager,self).get_queryset()
            return qs.order_by('-start_date')

        def most_recent(self):
            qs = self.get_queryset()  # get my ordered queryset
            return qs[:10]            # limit => get ten most recent entries

    class Project(PolymorphicModel):
        objects = PolymorphicManager()          # add the default polymorphic manager first
        objects_ordered = TimeOrderedManager()  # then add your own manager
        start_date = DateTimeField()            # project start is this date/time

The first manager defined (`objects` in the example) is used by Django as automatic manager for several purposes, including accessing related objects. It must not filter objects and it’s safest to use the plain `PolymorphicManager` here.

## Manager Inheritance

Polymorphic models inherit/propagate all managers from their base models, as long as these are polymorphic. This means that all managers defined in polymorphic base models continue to work as expected in models inheriting from this base model:

    from polymorphic.models import PolymorphicModel
    from polymorphic.managers import PolymorphicManager

    class TimeOrderedManager(PolymorphicManager):
        def get_queryset(self):
            qs = super(TimeOrderedManager,self).get_queryset()
            return qs.order_by('-start_date')

        def most_recent(self):
            qs = self.get_queryset()  # get my ordered queryset
            return qs[:10]            # limit => get ten most recent entries

    class Project(PolymorphicModel):
        objects = PolymorphicManager()          # add the default polymorphic manager first
        objects_ordered = TimeOrderedManager()  # then add your own manager
        start_date = DateTimeField()            # project start is this date/time

    class ArtProject(Project):  # inherit from Project, inheriting its fields and managers
        artist = models.CharField(max_length=30)

ArtProject inherited the managers `objects` and `objects_ordered` from Project.

`ArtProject.objects_ordered.all()` will return all art projects ordered regarding their start time and `ArtProject.objects_ordered.most_recent()` will return the ten most recent art projects.

## Using a Custom Queryset Class

The `PolymorphicManager` class accepts one initialization argument, which is the queryset class the manager should use. Just as with vanilla Django, you may define your own custom queryset classes. Just use `PolymorphicQuerySet` instead of Django’s `QuerySet` as the base class:

    from polymorphic.models import PolymorphicModel
    from polymorphic.managers import PolymorphicManager
    from polymorphic.query import PolymorphicQuerySet

    class MyQuerySet(PolymorphicQuerySet):
        def my_queryset_method(self):
            ...

    class MyModel(PolymorphicModel):
        my_objects = PolymorphicManager.from_queryset(MyQuerySet)()
        ...

If you do not wish to extend from a custom `PolymorphicManager` you may also prefer the `as_manager()` shortcut:

    from polymorphic.models import PolymorphicModel
    from polymorphic.query import PolymorphicQuerySet

    class MyQuerySet(PolymorphicQuerySet):
        def my_queryset_method(self):
            ...

    class MyModel(PolymorphicModel):
        my_objects = MyQuerySet.as_manager()
        ...

For further discussion see this topic on the Q&A page.