Setting up a foreign key to an abstract base class with Django

A generic relation seems to be the solution. But it will complicate things even further.

It seems to me; your model structure is already more complex than necessary. I would simply merge all three Answer models into one. This way:

• Answer_Risk would work without modification.
• You can set resident to None (NULL) in case of an Answer_A.
• You can return different string represantations depending on resident == None. (in other words; same functionality)

One more thing; are your answers likely to have more than one risk? If they’ll have none or one risk you should consider following alternative implementations:

• Using a one-to-one relationship
• Demoting risk as a field (or any number of fields) inside Answer class.

My main concern is neither database structure nor performance (although these changes should improve performance) but code maintainability.