How do you implement production-grade draft isolation in Django?

Question

I'm building an open-source LMS with a content studio for instructors &mdash; exams, quizzes, assignments, courses.Hit a wall with preview.Instructors don't want a fake preview.They want to actually take the exam they just built &mdash; real timer, real submission, real grading, state persisted across requests &mdash; then either publish it or throw everything away.Looked at three options.PostgreSQL schema separation is conceptually the cleanest but Django migrations get painful fast.is_draft flags end up as conditionals in every layer.Snapshot tables can't run real workflows.What I actually want is pytest-style DB isolation in production.Persistable, discardable.Does this exist? How do systems like this usually handle it?

apothegm · Accepted Answer

Instead of a completely separate DB or logic in each view, have you considered:
a) separate managers for live and draft?
b) proxy models for live and draft with separate managers?
c) live and draft child models of the same abstract base model?
But also: Django supports routing between multiple databases.
A third option would be to have multiple instances running with different settings off the same codebase.