Recursive templates?

[Milton Waddams]

Hi All,

I'm looking for advice on the best way to do the following.

I'm creating a simple message board app and would like to be able to recursively display threads to an unlimited depth. The existing php version recursively selects and displays the child threads until there are no more (not very high traffic so the inefficiency isn't a major problem).

I've setup my model as follows (simplified):

class Topic(meta.Model):
    parent = meta.ForeignKey('self', related_name="parents", blank=True)
    name = meta.CharField("Name", maxlength=200, blank=True)
    email = meta.CharField("Email", maxlength=200, blank=True)
    subject = meta.CharField("Subject", maxlength=200)
    body = meta.TextField("Body")
    stamp = meta.DateTimeField('Date Published', auto_now_add=True)

and the display I'd like to achieve is something along the lines of

first topic
---reply
-------reply
----------reply
----------reply
---reply
second topic
---reply
---reply
third topic

Also, is there a way for me to select all root level topics? (eg. where there is no parent), I've tried all the methods I could think of such as parent_id__exact=0 and similar ones though haven't been able to work out a way short of cycling through the returned records and filtering there.