Is it good practise to have the class name as a prefix in Django model?

Question

I wrote a model in this format in Django:

class Block(models.Model):
    block_id = models.AutoField(primary_key=True)
    block_name = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    block_code = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    block_content = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    block_change_date = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=True, default=datetime.now())
    block_published_date = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True, default=datetime.now())

Is this a useful practise to have block_ (or whatever other model name) for each or does it just add length to the field names?

Answer 1

No, it's not.

Think about it, where would you ever need them?

• Not when you create the model: you know what model are you creating.

• Not inside the model itself: you know where you are too.

• Nor when accessing the model later: you still know the type of the model, unless you don't care about the type, in which case prefixes will be only an annoyance.

Imagine a model such as:

class Person(models.Model):
    first_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)
    last_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)

Would person.person_first_name make more sense than person.first_name? Would Person ever contain a first_name which is not the first name of the person, so that you'll end up for example with:

class Person(models.Model):
    person_first_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)
    person_last_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)
    persons_husband_first_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)
    persons_first_child_first_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)
    persons_pet_first_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)
    administrator_first_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)

You might have already seen such code, but code like this is indicative of a complete misunderstanding of OOP by the author.

Another aspect to consider is inheritance. You may have:

class Person(models.Model):
    first_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)
    last_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)

class Employee(Person):
    pass

class Freelancer(Person):
    pass

Following the convention where model members are prefixed with the class name, you'll end up expecting employee.employee_first_name, but finding employee.person_first_name, which is counter-intuitive. If you start overriding members, things become even messier.

Finally, if you need a more authoritative source, more specific to Django models, look at documentation. The example above is copied from it. You'll see that other examples don't have such prefixes either.