Why is this many-to-many relation changing whitout me asking for it, using the Django ORM?

I have a recursive M2M relationship with an indicator class. An indi开发者_如何转开发cator is a int, or a calculated value from 2 indicators:

class Indicator(models.Model):


    params = models.ManyToManyField('self', 
                                verbose_name=__(u'parameters'),
                                related_name='params_of', 
                                blank=True, null=True)

    type = models.CharField(max_length=64, verbose_name=__(u'type'))

    def get_value(self, record):

        # etc

According to the type, get_value doesn't do the same things. It can just return the numerical value or calculate a value from the numerical value of each parameters from the params attribute. As you can see params is a recursive m2m relationship.

Now my problem is that, I have the follwoing indicators:

• men
• women
• total pop
• men ratio

If I add men and women as parameters of total pop, everything is fine, and I get my total pop dynamically calculated. But if I then add men and total pop as parameters to men ratio, then total pop automatically get men ratio as a parameter. It breaks everything.

Why is that? How can I avoid it?

M2M relations in Django are symmetric by default ie in an M2M, if a related to b then b also related to a. To stop this, use symmetrical=False

your params would become:

params = models.ManyToManyField('self', 
                                verbose_name=__(u'parameters'),
                                related_name='params_of', 
                                blank=True, null=True,
                                symmetrical=False)