Django JOIN query without foreign key

Question

Is there a way in Django to write a query using the ORM, not raw SQL that allows you to JOIN on another table without there being a foreign key? Looking through the documentation it appears in order for the One to One relationship to work there must be a foreign key present?

In the models below I want to run a query with a JOIN on UserActivity.request_url to UserActivityLink.url.

class UserActivity(models.Model):
    id = models.IntegerField(primary_key=True)
    last_activity_ip = models.CharField(max_length=45L, blank=True)
    last_activity_browser = models.CharField(max_length=255L, blank=True)
    last_activity_date = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    request_url = models.CharField(max_length=255L, blank=True)
    session_id = models.CharField(max_length=255L)
    users_id = models.IntegerField()
    class Meta:
        db_table = 'user_activity'

class UserActivityLink(models.Model):
    id = models.IntegerField(primary_key=True)
    url = models.CharField(max_length=255L, blank=True)
    url_description = models.CharField(max_length=255L, blank=True)
    type = models.CharField(max_length=45L, blank=True)
    class Meta:
        db_table = 'user_activity_link'

The link table has a more descriptive translation of given URLs in the system, this is needed for some reporting the system will generate.

I've tried creating the foreign key from UserActivity.request_url to UserActivityLink.url but it fails with the following error: ERROR 1452: Cannot add or update a child row: a foreign key constraint fails

Answer 1

No, there isn't an effective way unfortunately.

The .raw() is there for this exact thing. Even if it could it probably would be a lot slower than raw SQL.

There is a blogpost here detailing how to do it with query.join() but as they themselves point out. It's not best practice.