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The Follow Feature


In my last blog, I described how I dealt with the user profile issue I faced but it wasn't over, a bigger issue was yet to be solved. Instagram has given us a really good feature which we call "Follow", that lets us follow any other user and see whatever they post or in simpler words whatever they want the world to see. Simple, isn't it? Well in programming point of view, not really. Friends and Followers are the next most important part of an SNS (Social networking site). Why shouldn't it be? Most of the people use them so they could showoff things to other friends, family or someone totally unknown just because it somehow makes them feel valued. What kind of a disorder is that? Well, that's a totally different story which we are not supposed to discuss now. This feature so important because what's the point of calling it a social networking site when you don't have a network. So this problem is solved by me in the following manner
To begin with, let me tell you an interesting fact. Following on Instagram is quite different from friends on facebook. Friends in Facebook is a symmetrical relationship, I am your friend and hence you are my friend but following is not a symmetrical relationship, if you are interested in my stuff you can follow me and look at my stuff but I don't have to see your stuff until I am interested. Not exactly an interesting fact you expected but for the beginners like me, you got to know some technical terminology. There are many solutions to this problem and I am going to discuss the solutions I know. The first solution is a many to many relationships from the user table to itself. Don't be too confused and read the last line again. As you are following my blog you must be knowing what one to one and many to many relationships are. As your follower is also a user, a user can have many followers and many users can follow a user, Many to many relationships suit the situation. Done?  Not really, told you it isn't that easy. In Django for any relation, the reverse is also possible. To be simple all relations are symmetrical by default. This troubled me a lot and then our friend StackOverflow help and there is a keyword argument that could be passed in order to prevent this symmetrical relation, that is "symmetrical=False". This was one way of doing it. Another way of doing it, which I found suited my need best was maintaining a different table for the relation, each record of this new table will be having two fields follower and following, both of them would be users, hence each relation would be stored in a table and it would be convenient for our needs such as follower count and following count. I want to say this again, that this approach is best suited to my needs in My opinion and this is not the standard or the best way if any other way suits your situation well feel free to use it.
In this way, I have solved the problem of how to store the following details. Stay in touch for my further explorations 😉

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