musurca / narwhal Goto Github PK

Right now the Reference class is equivalent to a foreign key relationship. However, since foreign key constraints have now been enabled (to perform cascades on delete), References are now required to have a valid definition before a row can be added to the table. I would however prefer that References were optional, like normal Python objects, and could therefore retain a None value by default.

One possible way to address this is to add to a single row to each table when first created, with dbid = 0. This row will be considered a "NULL" reference (i.e. None) if addressed.

If enforcing a valid reference is considered useful, then maybe Reference could be subclassed into a new class called Requirement. The presence of this type would prohibit the parent from being added to the database unless it had a valid value.

Thoughts?

How well does it scale?

Thanks.