m2m and fk fields of Version objects are same as present values (not updating m2m and fk fields) about django-reversion HOT 2 CLOSED

Thanks for taking the time to explain your problem!

django-reversion might not be the best tool for what you're trying to do. It's made a few design decisions that go against your goals:

1. django-reversion stores all past versions using the django serialization framework. This means it works with any model and any model field, but the downside is that it becomes very slow to go through past versions of a model looking for a particular property (e.g. state).

2. django-reversion assumes only the "latest" version of an object is interesting, and all other versions exist for auditing and rollback. This decision is again optimized for ease of integration with any model, but it does narrow the use-cases.

In your case, you want to easily be able to access two versions of a model:

• The latest APPROVED version.
• The latest PENDING version.

I think you'll have a better long-term experience, and much better performance, by building this logic into your database table itself.

from django-reversion.

Hi! Sorry for the delay and thanks for your response!

Re: design decisions - if anyone else is considering using django-reversion for a use case similar to my own, please heed @etianen's advice and build the logic required into the database itself. It's probably a good idea to have - for any Object that requires a state or other attributes similar to my use case as described above - a separate ObjectHistory table.

This blog post here was extremely helpful for me; it might be for you, too: https://kaustavdm.in/versioning-content-postgresql/

@etianen - once again, thank you for building and maintaining this, and thank you for sharing your wisdom on how to get better performance and guidance re: design!

from django-reversion.