Friday, December 30, 2011

model for legacy table without primary key

I thought I had read somewhere that it was possible to have a model for a legacy table without a primary key as long as the useage was read only and that the method was “filter” and not “get”.  I’ve been searching for quite a while now and all I can find indicates a primary key is mandatory for any model.  I’m using Django 1.3 with MySQL 5.0 but plan to upgrade to MySQL 5.5 if that makes any difference.

 

The table has 4 fields that are unique together: userid, application, role, facility.  I populate the latter 3 by decoding the ldap group.  Unfortunately ldap group names are not defined consistently, so I have to write a special parser for each application (that I support in Django).  This table will be refreshed using MySQLdb from a cron job that queries ldap (i.e. no Django at this phase).  This  process updates a generic access table that is used by all my django apps.

 

I control this table, so I could let Django create an autonumber id as primary key, or I could combine all 4 columns to create a  primary key.  Since I really don’t need or have a good use for a primary key in this table, either technique seems inappropriate.  However if I’m being anal about this whole pk issue and need to just  bite the bullet, so be it.

 

Any sage advice?

 

Fred.

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