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implementing Django's ForeignKey Cascade Deletion optimization guide as Expected

๐Ÿ‘€ Views: 117 ๐Ÿ’ฌ Answers: 1 ๐Ÿ“… Created: 2025-06-13
django foreign-key cascade-delete Python

I'm maintaining legacy code that I tried several approaches but none seem to work. I've been researching this but Could someone explain I'm working on a personal project and I'm working with an scenario with Django where the cascade deletion behavior for a ForeignKey is not functioning as I anticipated. I have two models, `Author` and `Book`, where each `Book` has a ForeignKey to `Author` with `on_delete=models.CASCADE`. Hereโ€™s a simplified version of my models: ```python from django.db import models class Author(models.Model): name = models.CharField(max_length=100) class Book(models.Model): title = models.CharField(max_length=200) author = models.ForeignKey(Author, on_delete=models.CASCADE) ``` I created several books associated with an author and then deleted that author instance using the Django admin interface. To my surprise, the associated books are still present in the database. I verified that the `ForeignKey` is set up correctly and the database migrations were applied without errors. I tried running the `Book.objects.filter(author=author_instance).delete()` command in the shell after deleting the author, and that successfully removed the books, but shouldnโ€™t the cascade deletion handle this automatically? I double-checked my database settings and migrations, and everything seems to be in order. I'm using Django 3.2.8 with PostgreSQL as my database. Could there be a misconfiguration, or is there something else Iโ€™m missing regarding the cascade delete functionality? Any insights or suggestions would be greatly appreciated! I'm open to any suggestions. The project is a desktop app built with Python. Cheers for any assistance! The project is a service built with Python. I'm on Ubuntu 20.04 using the latest version of Python. Has anyone dealt with something similar?