[SOLVED] How to add capital to django-cities-light country model?

How to add capital to django-cities-light country model?

I'm using django-cities-light (lighter version of django-cities) with Django 1.8.x. It defines the abstract models of Country, Region/State and City, so that we can extend and add custom fields. For example, we can add timezone to city by writing a post_import signal handler as explained here.

Likewise I need to add the field capital to each country. I'm not much familiar in GeoDjango and I knew that django-cities app's Country has the capital field.

Solution

You need to setup a custom Country model. Lets say you have an app 'mygeonames' with models.py:

import cities_light

from django.db import models

from cities_light.settings import ICountry
from cities_light.receivers import connect_default_signals
from cities_light.abstract_models import (AbstractCountry, AbstractRegion,
    AbstractCity)

class Country(AbstractCountry):
    capital = models.CharField(max_length=50)
connect_default_signals(Country)


class Region(AbstractRegion):
    pass
connect_default_signals(Region)


class City(AbstractCity):
    pass
connect_default_signals(City)


def process_country_import(sender, instance, items, **kwargs):
    instance.capital = items[ICountry.capital]

cities_light.signals.country_items_post_import.connect(process_country_import)

Then in settings.py you should specify CITIES_LIGHT_APP_NAME = 'mygeonames', and put both apps 'cities_light' and 'mygeonames' to INSTALLED_APPS

After that you can migrate your DB and run ./manage.py cities_light

At the end you should get something like this:

In [1]: from mygeonames.models import Country
In [2]: cc = Country.objects.all()
In [3]: cc[0].capital
Out[3]: u'Paris'

But you might want to link with Cities table instead.