Compatibility with fixtures and initial data

[jazzband]

Compatibility with fixtures and initial data

[treyhunner]

Thanks for reporting this @BeccaMG!

I'm aware of this issue but it looks like it never made it into the issue tracker. Let's use this ticket to start the discussion about history on fixture-loaded data.

The test_raw_save test demonstrates this bug. Fixtures send a raw=True and django-simple-history does not save historical data for raw saves. It looks like this was disabled in 0fd9b8e.

I'm not sure what the downsides might be to forcing historical model creation on raw saves. Maybe we should look into this (try it out and see what tests fail, research raw and possible downsides to recording history when raw=True, etc.).

A process for manually creating historical records for existing data (like #60) may provide a workaround for this problem (since historical records could be created after fixtures are loaded).

[macro1]

First: Fixtures are pretty useful, but a solution like Factory Boy or Model Mommy may be more useful, especially in the long run.

As @treyhunner mentioned, there is now a populate_history command that will allow you to create historical versions of existing model instances. It appears to be undocumented though.

Personally, I'm against populating when raw=True. It looks like the idea behind that flag is to have the fixture data load directly into the database without side effects. If you wish the historical data to load as well, you could add fixtures for the historical models, correct? I could be speaking out of ignorance though, because I have not used the fixture features in Django.

[macro1]

Closing... I believe #153 is a related issue. We should probably add some documentation about migration and fixture cases.