Automatically add constants for each of the choices in a Django model

Question

I'm constantly doing the following pattern in Django:

class MyModel(models.Model):

    FOO = 1
    BAR = 2
    GOO = 3

    BLAH_TYPES = (
        (FOO, 'Foodally boogaly'),
        (BAR, 'Bar bar bar bar'),
        (GOO, 'Goo goo gaa gaa'),
    )

    TYPE_FOR_ID = dict(BLAH_TYPES)

    ID_FOR_TYPE = dict(zip(TYPE_FOR_ID.values(), TYPE_FOR_ID.keys()))

    blah = models.IntegerField(choices=BLAH_TYPES)

Is there a good pattern that other people follow that achieves the same effect (i.e. I have access to constants with names and dictionaries that go both ways) without so much code?

Answer 1

Carl Meyer's django-model-utils library has an excellent solution for this - the Choices class, which allows you to declare a list of choices with access via human-readable attributes.