Django how to fetch related objects with a join? - django

Question

My models are similar to the following:
class Reporter(models.Model):
def gold_star(self):
return self.article_set.get().total_views >= 100000
class Article(models.Model):
reporter = models.ForeignKey(Reporter, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
total_views = models.IntegerField(default=0, blank=True)
Then in one of the templates I have this line:
{% if r.gold_star %}<img src="{% static 'gold-star.png' %}">{% endif %}
Obviously django sends as many queries as there are reporters on the page... Ideally this could be just one query, which would select reporters by criteria and join appropriate articles. Is there a way?
EDIT
Neither select_related nor prefetch_related doesn't seem to work as I'm selecting on the Reporter table and then use RelatedManager to access related data on the Article.
In other words django doesn't know what to prefetch until there's non empty queryset.
Because an article can only have one reporter it's for sure possible to join these tables together and then apply filter to subquery, I just can't find how it's done in django query language.
There's alternative - select on the Article table and filter by Reporter fields, but there's a problem with such approach. If I deleted all the articles of some reporter then I wouldn't be able to include that reporter in the list as from the Article point of view such reporter doesn't exist and yet reporter is in the Reporter table.
EDIT2
I tried what people suggested in the comments. The following generates desired query:
reporters = Reporter.objects.filter(**query).select_related().annotate(
gold_star=Case(
When(article__total_views__gte=0, then=Value(1)),
default=Value(0),
output_field=IntegerField()
)
)
Query generated by django:
SELECT
`portal_reporter`.`id`,
...,
CASE WHEN `portal_article`.`total_views` >= 0 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END AS `gold_star`
FROM
`portal_reporter`
LEFT OUTER JOIN `portal_article`
ON (`portal_reporter`.`id` = `portal_article`.`reporter_id`)
WHERE
...
Now I just need to work out a way how to produce similar query but without Case/When statements.
EDIT3
If I chose slightly different strategy, then django selects wrong join type:
query['article__id__gte'] = 0
reporters = Reporter.objects.filter(**query).select_related()
This code produce similar query but with the INNER JOIN instead of desired LEFT OUTER JOIN:
SELECT
`portal_reporter`.`id`,
...,
FROM
`portal_reporter`
INNER JOIN `portal_article`
ON (`portal_reporter`.`id` = `portal_article`.`reporter_id`)
WHERE
...

Answer 1

You can use select_related (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.11/ref/models/querysets/#select-related) to do a join on the related table.
There's also prefetch_related (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.11/ref/models/querysets/#prefetch-related) which uses an IN clause to fetch the related objects with an extra query. The difference is explained in the docs, but is reproduced below:
select_related works by creating an SQL join and including the fields of the related object in the SELECT statement. For this reason, select_related gets the related objects in the same database query. However, to avoid the much larger result set that would result from joining across a ‘many’ relationship, select_related is limited to single-valued relationships - foreign key and one-to-one.
prefetch_related, on the other hand, does a separate lookup for each relationship, and does the ‘joining’ in Python. This allows it to prefetch many-to-many and many-to-one objects, which cannot be done using select_related, in addition to the foreign key and one-to-one relationships that are supported by select_related. It also supports prefetching of GenericRelation and GenericForeignKey, however, it must be restricted to a homogeneous set of results. For example, prefetching objects referenced by a GenericForeignKey is only supported if the query is restricted to one ContentType.

Answer 2

Try annotating the new field gold_star and set it to 1 if reporter has an article that has more than 100000 total_views like this:
from django.db.models import Case, When, Value, IntegerField
reporters = Reporter.objects.annotate(
gold_star=Case(
When(article__total_views__gte=100000, then=Value(1)),
default=Value(0),
output_field=IntegerField()
)
)
You can leave the template code as it is.