Django: Is it reasonable to use objects as dictionary keys?

Question

Is it reasonable to use objects as keys to a dictionary in django? I have done so and it works. But I am wondering if this is best practice, or if it is going to make difficulties I don't foresee right now.

I am working on a project which deals with educational standards. I have dictionaries with a structure along the lines of {Subject:[Standards]}. The model for subject looks something like:

class Subject(models.Model):
  subject = models.CharField(max_length=255, unique=True)

  def __unicode__(self):
    return self.subject

Is it okay to use the objects from this model as keys to my dictionaries, or should I be using a string represenation, such as Subject.subject instead?

If so, does the unicode method affect this? When I tried using Subject.subject as the key, I got things like {u'Math': [<Subject: Students can perform calculations.>]} Using objects as keys, it looks like {<Subject: Math>: [<Standard: Students can perform calculations.>]}

This is a followup to a question I asked yesterday about using None as a dictionary key.

Answer 1

Mutable objects shouldn't really be used as dictionary keys. That said, this works because the base model class defines __hash__ in terms of the model's primary key, which is unlikely to change. But I would prefer to use the pk directly as the key.