Django migrations ignoring db_table when set using metaclass

Question

I'm using a metaclass to automatically set my Django model db table names from camel case to '_' seperated names, e.g. MyGreatModel will have a table name like appname_my_great_model instead of the default appname_mygreatmodel:

class PrettyModelBase(ModelBase):

    def __new__(cls, name, bases, attrs):
        super_new = ModelBase.__new__(cls, name, bases, attrs)
        module_name = camel_to_underscore(name)
        model_module = sys.modules[cls.__module__]

        app_label = super_new.__module__.split('.')[-2]
        db_table = '%s_%s' % (app_label, module_name)
        if not getattr(super_new._meta, 'proxy', False):
             super_new._meta.db_table = db_table

        return super_new


class BaseModel(models.Model):

    __metaclass__ = PrettyModelBase

    class Meta:
        abstract = True

class MyGreatModel(BaseModel):
    somefield = models.TextField(default="")

However migrations doesn't seem to pick up this db_table name. If I run makemigrations, then CreateModel does not show db_table in the options for this model. If I hard-code it in the class Meta of MyGreatModel then it does. Moreover if I check the SQL to be run with python manage.py sqlmigrate... then it shows that it will create the appname_mygreatmodel table, not the delimited table name.

However if I do run this migration and then examine the model in the Django shell, then MyGreatModel._meta.db_table shows my_great_model as I would expect from my metaclass. If I manually add the db_table attribute the 0001 init migration options for CreateModel, then all is OK for subsequent migrations too, but Django should be doing that automatically I think...

Why is Django migrations not picking up the db_table here?

I'm using Django==1.10.5.

Thanks for any help

Answer 1

This question was re-raised on the django-developers mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/django-developers/ncMCwMF2J3g/V3guuDbJCwAJ

Django migrations uses model._meta.original_attrs to determine the definition of the meta class: https://github.com/django/django/blob/stable/2.2.x/django/db/migrations/state.py#L454

Thus if you're dynamically mutating model._meta post-creation, you'll also need to mutate its original_attrs dict correspondingly. I think that should work (untested).