Technical Proposal: Support for Inheriting PeriodicTask to Provide More Custom Fields

[NeverStopDreamingWang]

Background

If we need to add custom fields, currently we can only associate with the PeriodicTask model manually.

Existing Problems

Data Redundancy: Need to maintain relationships between two models
Complex Queries: Business queries require cross-table joins, affecting performance
Data Consistency: The lifecycle of two models needs to be synchronized manually
Code Complexity: Creating and deleting tasks requires handling operations on multiple models

Proposed Solution

Could you provide an inheritable model that contains the fields required by the Celery Beat scheduler?
For example:

class AbstractPeriodicTask(models.Model):
    task = models.CharField(
        max_length=200,
        verbose_name='Task Name',
        help_text=_('The Name of the Celery Task that Should be Run.  '
                    '(Example: "proj.tasks.import_contacts")'),
    )
    # Other fields...
    class Meta:
        abstract = True

Then provide a method to register my custom model with django_celery_beat.
This approach would not affect the internal implementation of django_celery_beat while enabling more custom fields.

Benefits

1. Simplified Architecture: Single model inheritance instead of complex relationships
2. Better Performance: Eliminates the need for JOIN operations
3. Enhanced Flexibility: Easy to add business-specific fields
4. Reduced Complexity: Simplified CRUD operations
5. Maintained Compatibility: Preserves all Celery Beat functionality

Implementation Suggestion

# Abstract base model provided by django_celery_beat
class AbstractPeriodicTask(models.Model):
    # All current PeriodicTask fields
    name = models.CharField(max_length=200, unique=True)
    task = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    interval = models.ForeignKey(IntervalSchedule, ...)
    crontab = models.ForeignKey(CrontabSchedule, ...)
    # ... other fields
    
    class Meta:
        abstract = True

# User's custom implementation
class CustomPeriodicTask(AbstractPeriodicTask):
    network = models.ForeignKey(NetWorkModel, ...)
    node = models.ForeignKey(NodeModel, ...)
    custom_field = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    
    class Meta:
        db_table = "custom_periodic_task"

# Registration method
from django_celery_beat import register_periodic_task_model
register_periodic_task_model(CustomPeriodicTask)

Expected Outcome

This enhancement would provide developers with greater flexibility while maintaining the robustness and functionality of django_celery_beat's scheduling system.

[auvipy]

we have a long term plan to make this packages fully abstract model