In model PageContent, created_by and changed_by shall be normalized

[jrief]

This is a big no-no in our database design of models: In model PageContent, fields created_by and changed_by contain the full name of the user instead of their foreign key. This strongly violates the 1st normalization rule according to Edgar F. Codd and should be out of debate.

Can anybody explain why this happened?

[marksweb]

I would suspect this is to handle users being deleted so that the name of the person persists.

[fsbraun]

If someone needed to keep information on former users would the Django way not be to deactivate the user?
I am thinking of a field with on_delete=models.SET_NULL. User objects are also stored by versioning and potentially other apps.

[marksweb]

Yes historically that's how I've handled things.

[jrief]

I agree with @fsbraun that users shall be deactivated. If they want to be removed from the database (GDPR compliance), we might add a function to hash their name, email, etc. on some way. But users shall not be removed. I would even argue to use on_delete=models.PROTECT on the foreign keys of CMS models pointing to User.

[fsbraun]

That's an interesting take. I can imagine making this configurable and being reused throughout the CMS (esp. within versioning). Options would be PROTECT and SET_NULL and ... ? I can imagine PROTECT being the default giving max. accountability.

versioning has a similar setting to prevent deleting historical versions.

[jrief]

SET_NULL has the problem that such a ForeigKey then must be nullable and on each lookup we must add code to check for None. Since imo users shall never be removed, this makes the code more brittle to errors.

[sepi]

I'd be ok with not allowing to remove users as a structure but then you would definitely need to roll out an action to scramble the personal data in the same release.

The only reason I see to store the users' names instead of references would be to have a better fidelity of the audit trail. A user changing their name to obscure something would still be recorded as it was at the time. It's pretty contrived I must agree.