Model-mapping tool

[fgomez828]

Background

Several of our long-standing projects, including django-councilmatic and its instances, have complex model relationships. This makes it exceptionally tricky to onboard contributors and requires contributors to spend a significant amount of time re-orienting themselves to model relationships.

It would be helpful to have a Django plugin or some other tool that would allow us to create a diagram based off of the existing tables in a database. Tools like dbeaver do the mapping piece of this, but having a Django tool might be preferable if it is easier to use.

Proposal

Main question to answer: Are there any tools that would allow us to quickly and easily visualize model relationships based on existing database tables?

Tasks:

• Identify other tools like dbeaver, keeping note of how complex the tool is to use and what it would require from our apps in order to work
• Based on research, identify 2-3 tools to test on one of our more complex apps, noting ease of use and quality of mapping visualization
• Propose one tool to include in our stack

Deliverables

Artifacts will include:

• a short list of 2-3 model mapping tools with short descriptions of pros and cons for each tool, including ease of use and quality of visualization
• recommendation for one model mapping tool to adopt into DataMade's stack

Timeline

I believe this would take one or two full investment days. This would include time to do some preliminary research (3 hours), identify 2-3 tools to try (1 hour), try out 2-3 tools (5 hours), and write up a recommendation for one of the tools (2 hours) (estimated total: 11 hours).

This may take more or less time if there is a dearth of information about model-mapping tools or if one or more of the tools take much more or less time than expected to try out.

[beamalsky]

I think this is a great idea !!

[hancush]

A lot of good suggestions here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/6777376

I tried django-extensions with pyparsing/ pydot over in Metro Councilmatic. The resulting diagram is still a bit of a mess, but it does represent an improvement over DBeaver, and I think it could suit our needs for less complicated apps. (OCD is just hypernormalized, making it a unique challenge.)

[smcalilly]

gonna close for now, please feel free to reopen this if anybody is interested.