Django model design advice

Question

I am currently learning Django, specifically DRF to make an API that will be consumed by a web app client. The app is for a teacher who gives extracurricular classes in Mathematics and Science. My basic idea is that there will be two types of User, a Student and a Teacher. Teachers will obviously have more access rights than Students. The problem is, a django User class has the is_admin attribute and, since only Teachers could possibly be admin of the site, I cannot create a single User class that has is_admin and user_type attribute. For instance, the User with is_admin=True and user_type=Student will be an invalid combination. My idea is to make my User class as an Abstract Base Class and then make two seperate classes, Student and Teacher, that inherit from it. This is also ideal in the sense that only Teachers can publish articles, which means the Student class just won't have that permission, but then I face another problem. All Users have a single Profile. The Profile will store a bio, an avatar image of the user, etc. But when setting up the OneToOneField relationship in Profile, the profile must have that relationship with Students and Teachers, thus all User types. How can I set up that relationship? Can I say OneToOneField(User) and due to the inheritance that user could be a Student or a Teacher? If not, what should I do?

If you have experience and you are thinking, why on earth is he (that is me) doing that?, feel free to comment on my design plan and please show me how a better design would look. Thanks in advance.

EDIT: Is there any advantage in having a single profile for each user, storing a bio and image etc? Is there any gain in this over storing that info in the User model?

Answer 1

Don't create separate classes. Just that they have different permissions doesn't mean they need to be different classes! They can all be User (or your own subclass of that, but the same).

Then you configure two different groups (docs). You assign each new user to one of the two groups.

Your code can then use some custom permission (say a 'publish' permission on Article) and give that permission to the Teacher group, and check in your code that the current user has that permission.

Typically only one or a few users have "is_admin", is_admin means that you automatically have all existing permissions. It's for user management, configuring the groups, and such.

Answer 2

Keep it as one class unless you need each class to have different attributes. But in your case, you can just make is_staff=True synonymous with being a teacher, and then you could get rid of the user_type attribute. It's usually better practice to use boolean fields instead of char fields with a finite set of choices that do unknown things in the code. So staff would be teachers, and non-staff would be students.

Aside: By "is_admin", you meant "is_staff", right? I am not aware that the django User model has an "is_admin" attribute, only is_staff and is_superuser.