Heads up! To view this whole video, sign in with your Courses account or enroll in your free 7-day trial. Sign In Enroll
Well done!
You have completed A Social Network with Flask!
You have completed A Social Network with Flask!
Preview
To make our app truly social, we need to add a model to represent the relationship between two users. We'll do this with a new model that has two foreign keys, both of which point back to the `User` model.
New terms
-
indexes- A list of indexes to create on the model. These could be fields to index for faster searches or, as in our case, fields to make unique. More information -
.join()- A query that references another table or another query.
Related Discussions
Have questions about this video? Start a discussion with the community and Treehouse staff.
Sign upRelated Discussions
Have questions about this video? Start a discussion with the community and Treehouse staff.
Sign up
Okay we need relationships in our app so
that we can actually call it social.
0:04
We'll do a pretty simple relationship
where I can follow you, but
0:09
that doesn't automatically make you follow
me.
0:12
The usual way of talking about this is
calling it an asymmetrical relationship.
0:15
We'll do that with a couple of foreign
keys and a new model, and
0:19
then we'll update our user model to add
some handy query methods for
0:22
finding out who you're following and who's
following you.
0:25
'Kay, so we need to build our relationship
model.
0:29
And we're gonna add that in down here.
0:33
And it's gonna be called class
Relationship.
0:35
And it's a model.
0:39
And so we're gonna have two fields.
0:41
We're gonna have the user that it's from
which is always gonna be,
0:42
when you're thinking about this, me.
0:47
It's always the user who's logged in.
0:48
So from_user, and ForeignKeyField,
0:50
and up here we did this rel model user
related name equals posts.
0:56
We can do that, or we can just say user
and
1:00
then related_name equals relationships.
1:03
And then to_user, ForeignKeyField, also
user.
1:08
And it has to have a different related
name.
1:15
So we're gonna say related_to.
1:17
So this one you can think of, who are the
people who are related to me,
1:19
and this one, who are the people I'm
related to?
1:23
Now we have to add in something different
down here to the class meta than
1:26
what we've had before.
1:30
So first and first we're gonna say
database is equal to DATABASE.
1:31
But then the new thing is that we have to
specify an index.
1:34
We haven't done indexes before.
1:38
So indexes tell the database how to find
the data to remember the data.
1:40
But it also allows us to specify whether
or not a index is unique,
1:47
so what we wanna do is we want to say that
this is a unique index.
1:55
So let's go ahead and specify the index
first.
2:01
So each index is a tuple.
2:03
Inside of that is a tuple of fields.
2:06
So from_user and to_user.
2:08
Those are our two fields that are in our
unique index.
2:13
And then we say true, so that we know that
this is a unique index.
2:18
So we're gonna save that, and we're gonna
add relationship down here.
2:22
And then, we need to go change our user
model.
2:29
Our user models queries,
2:34
these are gonna be some very different
queries from what you're used to seeing.
2:36
So, let's come back up here to our user
and let's add in two new ones,
2:40
one of which to get the people that we
follow [SOUND], and
2:45
one of which will get the people that are
following us.
2:49
So, let's start with the people that we're
following.
2:53
So let's put a name on this.
2:56
The users that we are following.
2:57
And yeah, feel free to add doc strings and
3:00
comments to all of this stuff cuz there's
a lot in here.
3:04
So return.
3:08
This is gonna take up a lot of lines, so
I'm gonna stick it into parens here.
3:08
So user, and then, we're gonna say
.select, and
3:14
then .join, cuz we need to do a join.
3:18
We need to select from multiple tables at
once.
3:21
So Relationship, that's the table we need
to select from, or the model, rather.
3:24
The field we're gonna select on is
relationship.to_user,
3:30
so select where the one's that I'm related
to
3:36
let's put that on the next line and then
where,
3:42
relationship.from_user is equal to me.
3:47
Put that on the next line too.
3:51
'Kay, so.
3:53
We're gonna select all the users where the
relationship to user.
3:55
All right, I wanna get the, the
relationship.to_user,
4:00
I wanna get all those users where the
from_user is me in the relationship, okay.
4:03
A bit of stuff moving around, like I said.
4:08
And then let's do followers, so these are
the people who are following me.
4:12
Get users following the current user.
4:17
So again, this is gonna be multiple lines,
so we'll do parenths, user.select.join.
4:25
Hey look, another join.
4:32
And we want to do Relationship,
on=Relationship.from_user.
4:36
I'm just making sure I'm getting these,
opposite to each other.
4:45
.where, Relationship.to_user is equal to
me.
4:49
And, yeah I'll put that on the next line.
4:54
So these two are basically exact opposites
of each other.
4:56
So on this one we're joining on the
to_user,
4:58
this one we're joining on the from_user.
5:01
We're doing a where for the from_user
here,
5:03
we're doing a where on the to_user here.
5:05
So those are not amazingly [LAUGH] hard,
amazingly hard queries to understand,
5:08
but if you've not worked with joins
before, they're a little weird.
5:14
They're a little, I mean, it's almost
ridiculous having to,
5:18
like, figure out where these things
traverse.
5:20
Those queries are intense, but
5:24
learning to use joins like that will open
up a lot of new worlds for using ORMs.
5:26
Now that we can follow people and see
who's following us,
5:29
let's build the UI that we need to create
these relationships.
5:33
You need to sign up for Treehouse in order to download course files.
Sign upYou need to sign up for Treehouse in order to set up Workspace
Sign up