With the just released django-dbindexer you can use all Django lookup types ("iexact", "month", "day", etc.) on non-relational DBs like App Engine and MongoDB, even if they're not natively supported by that DB! Also, django-dbindexer can help you with optimizing your code. For instance, case-insensitive filters on MongoDB can't use indexes, so they're not very efficient. With django-dbindexer they can be handled as efficient case-sensitive filters which utilize an index. Sounds too good to be true? Keep reading.

Non-relational databases have rather limited query APIs. For example, on App Engine you can't do a case-insensitive "iexact" match. Developers on these platforms have to use ugly workarounds to implement unsupported filters. Poor guys. ;) This is how you'd emulate "iexact" and "month" on App Engine (using djangoappengine):

# models.py:

class MyModel(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=64)
    lowercase_name = models.CharField(max_length=64, editable=False)
    last_modified = models ...

Quick update: Florian Hahn has implemented a solution for permission handling with Django on non-relational databases. Django's own permission system unfortunately requires JOIN support and thus doesn't work. After his original announcement the code has been optimized, so a permission check can be done with just two database operations. Also, his backend now scales with the number of users. Florian has posted installation and usage instructions on his blog. Check it out if you need permission support in your project.

Alex Gaynor has posted a final status update on his Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project which should bring official NoSQL support to Django. Basically, Django now has a working MongoDB backend (not to be confused with the MongoDB backend for Django-nonrel: django-mongodb-engine) and (after lots of skepticism) the ORM indeed needed only minor changes to support non-relational backends (surprise, surprise ;). There are still a few open design issues, but probably the ORM changes will be merged into trunk and the MongoDB backend will become a separate project.

The biggest design issue (in my opinion) is how to handle AutoField. In the GSoC branch, non-relational model code would always need a manually added NativeAutoField(primary_key=True) because many NoSQL DBs use string-based primary keys. As you can see in Django-nonrel, a NativeAutoField is unnecessary. The normal AutoField already works very well and it has the advantage that you can reuse ...

This is the second post in our django-mediagenerator series. If you haven't read it already, please read the first post before continuing: django-mediagenerator: total asset management

.content
  padding: 0
  p
    margin-bottom: 2em
  .alert
    color: red ...

It was planned already very long to add some remaining features from gae-search to nonrel-search and since we stopped developing gae-search we decided to make some of the premium features open-source. So let's see what changed.

# post.models
from django.db import models

class Post(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length ...

We really weren't posting often enough recently. Now we'll make up for it with an awesome new asset manager called django-mediagenerator. Those of you who used app-engine-patch might still remember a media generator. This one is completely rewritten with a new backend-based architecture and muchos flexibility for the shiny new HTML5 web-apps world (see the feature comparison table). In this post I'll give you a quick intro and after that I'll make another post about some crazy stuff you can do with the media generator.

Hey, after a lot of work in the last few weeks I'm finally ready to introduce you to one of our latest projects called PyvaScript. It's a new scripting language for your client side code with a syntax inspired by our favorite language Python. :) So let's take a closer look at what Waldemar conjured up.

An annoying problem when trying to reuse an existing Django app is that some apps use TextField instead of CharField and still want to filter on that field. On App Engine TextField is not indexed and thus can't be filtered against. One app which has this problem is django-openid-auth. Previously, you had to modify the model source code directly and replace TextField with CharField where necessary. However, this is not a good solution because whenever you update the code you have to apply the patch, again. Now, djangoappengine provides a solution which allows you to configure indexes for individual fields without changing the models. By decoupling DB-specific indexes from the model definition we simplify maintenance and increase code portability.