Ask HN: How do you implement production-grade draft isolation in Django?

1 points by _vlie 4mo ago ↗ HN

I'm building an open-source LMS with a content studio for instructors — exams, quizzes, assignments, courses.

Hit a wall with preview.

Instructors don't want a fake preview.

They want to actually take the exam they just built — real timer, real submission, real grading, state persisted across requests — then either publish it or throw everything away.

Looked at three options.

PostgreSQL schema separation is conceptually the cleanest but Django migrations get painful fast.

is_draft flags end up as conditionals in every layer.

Snapshot tables can't run real workflows.

What I actually want is pytest-style DB isolation in production.

Persistable, discardable.

Does this exist? How do systems like this usually handle it?

1 comment

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apothegm 4mo ago ↗

Instead of a completely separate DB or logic in each view, have you considered:

a) separate managers for live and draft?

b) proxy models for live and draft with separate managers?

c) live and draft child models of the same abstract base model?

But also: Django supports routing between multiple databases.

A third option would be to have multiple instances running with different settings off the same codebase.