How to express a One-To-Many relationship in Django?

To handle One-To-Many relationships in Django you need to use ForeignKey.

The documentation on ForeignKey is very comprehensive and should answer all the questions you have:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.2/ref/models/fields/#foreignkey

The current structure in your example allows each Dude to have one number, and each number to belong to multiple Dudes (same with Business).

If you want the reverse relationship, you would need to add two ForeignKey fields to your PhoneNumber model, one to Dude and one to Business. This would allow each number to belong to either one Dude or one Business, and have Dudes and Businesses able to own multiple Numbers. I think this might be what you are after.

class Business(models.Model):
    ...
class Dude(models.Model):
    ...
class PhoneNumber(models.Model):
    dude = models.ForeignKey(Dude)
    business = models.ForeignKey(Business)

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In Django, a one-to-many relationship is called ForeignKey. It only works in one direction, however, so rather than having a number attribute of class Dude you will need

class Dude(models.Model):
    ...

class PhoneNumber(models.Model):
    dude = models.ForeignKey(Dude)

Many models can have a ForeignKey to one other model, so it would be valid to have a second attribute of PhoneNumber such that

class Business(models.Model):
    ...
class Dude(models.Model):
    ...
class PhoneNumber(models.Model):
    dude = models.ForeignKey(Dude)
    business = models.ForeignKey(Business)

You can access the PhoneNumbers for a Dude object d with d.phonenumber_set.objects.all(), and then do similarly for a Business object.

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To be more clear - there's no OneToMany in Django, only ManyToOne - which is Foreignkey described above. You can describe OneToMany relation using Foreignkey but that is very inexpressively.

A good article about it: https://amir.rachum.com/blog/2013/06/15/a-case-for-a-onetomany-relationship-in-django/

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You can use either foreign key on many side of OneToMany relation (i.e. ManyToOne relation) or use ManyToMany (on any side) with unique constraint.

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Django is smart enough. Actually we don't need to define oneToMany field. It will be automatically generated by Django for you. We only need to define a foreignKey in the related table. In other words, we only need to define ManyToOne relation by using foreignKey.

class Car(models.Model):
    # wheels = models.oneToMany() to get wheels of this car [**it is not required to define**].


class Wheel(models.Model):
    car = models.ForeignKey(Car, on_delete=models.CASCADE)  

If we want to get the list of wheels of particular car, we will use Python's auto generated object wheel_set. For car c you will use c.wheel_set.all().

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While rolling stone's answer is good, straightforward and functional, I think there are two things it does not solve.

If OP wanted to enforce a phone number cannot belong to both a Dude and a Business The inescapable feeling of sadness as a result of defining the relationship on the PhoneNumber model and not on the Dude/Business models. When extra terrestrials come to Earth, and we want to add an Alien model, we need to modify the PhoneNumber (assuming the ETs have phone numbers) instead of simply adding a "phone_numbers" field to the Alien model.

Introduce the content types framework, which exposes some objects that allow us to create a "generic foreign key" on the PhoneNumber model. Then, we can define the reverse relationship on Dude and Business

from django.contrib.contenttypes.fields import GenericForeignKey, GenericRelation
from django.contrib.contenttypes.models import ContentType
from django.db import models

class PhoneNumber(models.Model):
    number = models.CharField()

    content_type = models.ForeignKey(ContentType, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
    object_id = models.PositiveIntegerField()
    owner = GenericForeignKey()

class Dude(models.Model):
    numbers = GenericRelation(PhoneNumber)

class Business(models.Model):
    numbers = GenericRelation(PhoneNumber)

See the docs for details, and perhaps check out this article for a quick tutorial.

Also, here is an article that argues against the use of Generic FKs.

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First of all we take a tour:

01) one-to-many relationship:

ASSUME:

class Business(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    .........
    .........
    phone_number = models.OneToMany(PhoneNumber) (NB: Django do not support OneToMany relationship)

class Dude(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    .........
    .........
    phone_number = models.OneToMany(PhoneNumber) (NB: Django do not support OneToMany relationship)

class PhoneNumber(models.Model):
    number = models.CharField(max_length=20)
    ........
    ........

NB: Django doesn't provides any OneToMany relationship. So we can't use upper method in Django. But we need to convert in relational model. So what can we do? In this situation we need to convert relational model into reverse relational model.

Here:

relational model = OneToMany

So, reverse relational model = ManyToOne

NB: Django support ManyToOne relationship & in Django ManyToOne is represented by ForeignKey.

02) many-to-one relationship:

SOLVE:

class Business(models.Model):
    .........
    .........

class Dude(models.Model):
    .........
    .........

class PhoneNumber(models.Model):
    ........
    ........
    business = models.ForeignKey(Business)
    dude = models.ForeignKey(Dude)

NB: THINK SIMPLY!!

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Actually, one-to-many relationship is very useful. I do something like this:

class Dude(models.Model):
    number = models.ManyToManyField(PhoneNumber)

    def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
        if Dude.objects.get(number=self.number):
            raise Exception("Dude, this number has been used.")
        return super(Dude, self).save(*args, **kwargs)

class PhoneNumber(models.Model):
    number = models.CharField(...)

This will ensure the number only use once.

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If the "many" model does not justify the creation of a model per-se (not the case here, but it might benefits other people), another alternative would be to rely on specific PostgreSQL data types, via the Django Contrib package

Postgres can deal with Array or JSON data types, and this may be a nice workaround to handle One-To-Many when the many-ies can only be tied to a single entity of the one.

Postgres allows you to access single elements of the array, which means that queries can be really fast, and avoid application-level overheads. And of course, Django implements a cool API to leverage this feature.

It obviously has the disadvantage of not being portable to others database backend, but I thougt it still worth mentionning.

Hope it may help some people looking for ideas.

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A one to many relationship implies that one model record can have many other model records associated with itself.

from django.db import models

class Menu(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=30)

class Item(models.Model):
    menu = models.ForeignKey(Menu)
    name = models.CharField(max_length=30)
    description = models.CharField(max_length=100)

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