Migrating data from "Many-To-Many" to "Many-To-Many Through" in django

1. Create your intermediate model without any extra fields, for now. Give it a unique constraint to match the existing one and specify the table name to match the existing one:

   class CategoryEntry(models.Model):
       category = models.ForeignKey(Category)
       entry = models.ForeignKey(Entry)   
   
       class Meta:
           db_table='main_category_entries'   #change main_ to your application
           unique_together = (('category', 'entry'))
   

2. Run the South schema migration.

3. Edit the generated schema migration script and comment-out all the forwards and backwards entries, since you'll be re-using the existing intersection table. Add pass to complete the methods.

4. Run the migration.

5. Update any existing code. As it says in https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/models/#many-to-many-relationships, "Unlike normal many-to-many fields, you can't use add, create, or assignment to create relationships" so you'll need to modify any existing application code, e.g.

   c.entry.add(e)
   

   could become:

   try:
       categoryentry = c.categoryentry_set.get(entry = e)
   except CategoryEntry.DoesNotExist:
       categoryentry = CategoryEntry(category=c, entry=e)
       categoryentry.save()
   

   and:

   e.category_entries.add(c)
   

   could become:

   categoryentry = CategoryEntry(category=c, entry=e)  #set extra fields here
   categoryentry.save()                
   

   and:

   c.entry.remove(e)
   

   could become:

   categoryentry = c.categoryentry_set.get(entry = e)
   categoryentry.delete()
   

6. Once this initial pseudo migration has been done, you should then be able to add the extra fields to the CategoryEntry and create further migrations as normal.

I'd do it in the following way:

1. Add the CategoryEntry class to the model, and do an auto schema migration. This will add an empty table containing the properties of CategoryEntry. To be noted, the older M2M table remains untouched since through='CategoryEntry' has not yet been added.

2. Do a data migration to copy all data from the existing M2M table to the table created in step 1. To do so, run the datamigration command, and edit methods forward() and backward() in the auto generated migration script accordingly.

3. Now add through='CategoryEntry' part (just the way you wanted), and do a schemamigration. this will drop the old M2M table.

In Django 1.7+ built-in migrations, the way the "code state" (i.e. the code definition of models) is calculated is different, and requires a different solution.

In South (Django pre-1.7), the entire "code state" is saved in each migration — but in Django 1.7+ built-in migrations, it's derived from looking at the whole set of migrations, so you need to specify the "code state" change in a migration without altering the database.

Like above, this will need to be done in a few steps.

1. Create an intermediate model like in the answer above:

   class CategoryEntry(models.Model):
       category = models.ForeignKey(Category, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
       entry = models.ForeignKey(Entry, on_delete=models.CASCADE)   
   
       class Meta:
            db_table = 'main_category_entries'   #change main_ to your application
            unique_together = ('category', 'entry')
   

2. Create an auto-migration with django-admin.py makemigrations and modify the code; move the operations list into the state_operations argument of a migrations.SeparateDatabaseAndState operation, and leave the database_operations list empty. It should look like:

   class Migration(migrations.Migration):
       operations = [
           migrations.SeparateDatabaseAndState(
               state_operations=[ 
                   migrations.CreateModel(CategoryEntry..)
                   ...
               ],
               database_operations=[]
           ),
       ]
   

3. Edit the CategoryEntry to contain what you want and create a new auto-migration with django-admin.py makemigrations