Peewee: How to design models in a ManyToManyField with a through_model

[bcthomas]

(new to peewee/python orms, coming from a "legacy" rails database)

I'm trying to model 2 elements in a many to many relationship, using a join table;
I have a User and a Project, and a join table called ProjectUser.

I've tried this, and I'm getting circular dependency errors because as is ProjectUser is not defined in Project, and if I swap where I define each, then Project isn't defined in ProjectUser:

# models/projects.py
from peewee import *
from playhouse.fields import ManyToManyField

from . import users as u

class Project(BaseModel):
  name = CharField(null=True)
  users = ManyToManyField(u.User, related_name='projects', through_model=ProjectUser)

  class Meta:
    db_table = 'projects'

class ProjectUser(BaseModel):
  project = ForeignKeyField(Project, db_column='project_id', index=True, null=True)
  user = ForeignKeyField(u.User, db_column='user_id', index=True, null=True)

  class Meta:
    db_table = 'project_users'

# models/users.py
class User(BaseModel):
  email = CharField(unique=True)

When I let peewee determine the table name (by removing the through_model param), it seems to be ok, but obviously my join table isn't named correctly that way.

Can the ForeignKeyField declarations in the ProjectUser model be defined dynamically so I can avoid the circular dependency? Or phrased differently, how would I accomplish this with a custom-named through_model table?

or or... am I just not thinking about this correctly?

TIA!

ps all my models were generated by using pwiz on my rails database.

[coleifer]

You can use the Proxy object see circular foreign keys.

class User(BaseModel):
  email = CharField(unique=True)

ProjectUserProxy = Proxy()

class Project(BaseModel):
  name = CharField(null=True)
  users = ManyToManyField(
    User, 
    related_name='projects', 
    through_model=ProjectUserProxy)

  class Meta:
    db_table = 'projects'

class ProjectUser(BaseModel):
  project = ForeignKeyField(Project, db_column='project_id', index=True, null=True)
  user = ForeignKeyField(User, db_column='user_id', index=True, null=True)

  class Meta:
    db_table = 'project_users'

ProjectUserProxy.initialize(ProjectUser)

Everything worked correctly with the above code when I tried creating some users, projects, and the relationships between them. The custom through table appeared to be working as well.