djangodjango-modelsdjango-ormdjango-1.7django-migrations

Creating Partial Indexes with Django 1.7


The documentation for Django 1.7 mentions RunSQL classes can be used to create partial indexes on your tables. I have a table where I want the combination of title, blog & category to be unique. However if category is not provided, the combination of title & blog should still be unique.

class Post(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    blog = models.ForeignKey(Blog)
    category = models.ForeignKey(Category, null=True, blank=True)

I can achieve this constraint with partial indexes (like the SQL shown below). Where do I add this code if I'm using Django 1.7 migrations?

CREATE UNIQUE INDEX idx1 
  ON Post (title, blog_id, category_id) 
  WHERE category_id IS NOT NULL;

CREATE UNIQUE INDEX idx2 
  ON Post (title, blog_id)
  WHERE category_id IS NULL;

Solution

  • Django 2.2 and later

    As of version 2.2 Django supports declarative partial unique indexes on databases that support them (PostgreSQL and SQLite). So you could do something like:

    from django.db.models import Model, Q, UniqueConstraint
    
    class Post(Model):
        ...
        class Meta:
            constraints = [
                UniqueConstraint(
                    fields=["title", "blog", "category"],
                    name="idx1",
                    condition=Q(category__isnull=False)),
                UniqueConstraint(
                    fields=["title", "blog"], 
                    name="idx2",                    
                    condition=Q(category__isnull=True)),
            ]
    

    Django 2.1 and earlier

    In older versions you need to do this with migrations. First create a new, empty migration file:

    python manage.py makemigrations --empty yourappname
    

    Then, for each index add an appropriate RunSQL line:

    operations = [
        migrations.RunSQL("CREATE UNIQUE INDEX..."),
        migrations.RunSQL("CREATE UNIQUE INDEX..."),
    ]
    

    Finally, run migrate.