Always treat a ForeignKey field like it was in raw_id_fields in Django Admin

Question

This scenario happens way too often in my project:

• someone adds a model Foo that has several ForeignKey fields, one of them to refers to model Bar
• an admin is added for that model (and works OK)
• the code is deployed
• on production server, Bar has millions of instances
• someone accesses Foo's admin page; Django tries to retrieve all Bars at once (to display them in a combo box) and the server gets overloaded
• later the problem gets fixed by editing Foo's admin and adding bar to raw_id_fields.

I'd like to prevent this situation from happening in the future, preferably by somehow stating (once and for all) that Bar has many rows and it should be always treated as if the field referring to it was listed in raw_id_fields in all admin pages. Is this possible somehow?

Answer 1

This is an excelent point. This is a critical issue that can turn down the database and even the web server.

Considering this, I believe the default approach MUST be the raw_id_fields thing. If you know what you are doing, then you change this behavior.

Unfortunately, most of the authors of the admin interfaces libraries disagree of this thought. Not just for Python-Django, but also for other communities like Ruby-Rails.

5 years ago I got tired having the same problem, then I developed the django-smart-autoregister, that do this and also auto configure using another good patterns. Even today I face this problem, so I guess it is worth to take a look.

ps: the library was originally implemented using a modular approach, though you just call some functions that will configure the raw_id_fields for you according to the model field.