Django migration would delete important table - django-migrations

Question

SHORT VERSION: Django's migration subsystem seems to want to drop and re-create my table, rather than just adding a column. How can I fix that?
LONG VERSION:
I'd like to add a field to one of my Django 3.0 models. No biggie, right?
add field to the class definition
manage.py makemigrations
manage.py migrate
So there's a strange issue....when I run makemigrations, I see this in the output:
Migrations for 'api':
api/migrations/0006_auto_20200814_0953.py
- Delete model APISearch
[snip]
- Create model APISearch
[snip]
And sure enough, there are instructions in the resulting migrations to delete and then create an APISearch model.
That would be very bad...APISearch is a real table in my database, containing important data.
I think the issue has to do with the fact that a long time ago, APISearch was a proxy class (it has long since been changed to a concrete class). I can't figure out how Django is determining proxy-ness, so that I can correct it.

Answer 1

I think I found the solution.
Edit the migration that originally created the class:
operations = [
migrations.CreateModel(
name='APISearch',
fields=[
],
options={
'proxy': True, # explicitly set this to False
'indexes': [],
},
bases=('foo.search',),
),
]
Create an empty migration, and use the AddField method to do what I want
operations = [
migrations.AddField(
model_name='apisearch',
name='my_new_field',
field=models.NullBooleanField(blank=True, null=True),
),
]