Django: Filtering out duplicate query results - django

I have a model:
class Item(models.Model):
date = models.DateField()
I would like to select one of these objects for each date, with no duplicates.
So if there were 100 items in the database, which had dates of either 1/1/12 or 1/2/12, I would want to return a list of two objects (one for 1/1/12 and one for 1/2/12).
I'm not sure of the terminology for this kind of query, so am having trouble searching for an answer.
I'm currently using this query:
item_list = Item.objects.distinct('date')
But it is not working as I expected.
Any help appriciated.
Thanks for reading.

Are you using Postgress SQL? Django documentation says distinct on fields works only with that DB. Also you have to use order_by before using distinct().
Check documentation : django distinct

Related

How to properly use dates in object filters

I'm using Django ORM to access database models, it works well when I use objects.all(), it returns all the objects in the database. But when I want to filter on a date I add a filter using the new date type it doesnt return anything, I get a blank QuerySet. After searching and trying different things for many hours I discovered object.filter(date__gte=date) works.
For example:
This works, I get all the records where date = today:
today = date.today()
Model.objects.filter(date__gte=today)
These do not work, they return empty QuerySets:
Model.objects.filter(date__contains=today)
Model.objects.filter(date__startswith=today)
Model.objects.filter(date__date=date.today())
My question is what am I doing wrong that one type of query works but not the other, when they should all return the same data?
You can do it like this(Reference) for DateTimeField:
Model.objects.filter(date__date=datetime.today())
If its a DateField, then simply do:
Model.objects.filter(date=datetime.today())

Django 1.11 Annotating a Subquery Aggregate

This is a bleeding-edge feature that I'm currently skewered upon and quickly bleeding out. I want to annotate a subquery-aggregate onto an existing queryset. Doing this before 1.11 either meant custom SQL or hammering the database. Here's the documentation for this, and the example from it:
from django.db.models import OuterRef, Subquery, Sum
comments = Comment.objects.filter(post=OuterRef('pk')).values('post')
total_comments = comments.annotate(total=Sum('length')).values('total')
Post.objects.filter(length__gt=Subquery(total_comments))
They're annotating on the aggregate, which seems weird to me, but whatever.
I'm struggling with this so I'm boiling it right back to the simplest real-world example I have data for. I have Carparks which contain many Spaces. Use Book→Author if that makes you happier but —for now— I just want to annotate on a count of the related model using Subquery*.
spaces = Space.objects.filter(carpark=OuterRef('pk')).values('carpark')
count_spaces = spaces.annotate(c=Count('*')).values('c')
Carpark.objects.annotate(space_count=Subquery(count_spaces))
This gives me a lovely ProgrammingError: more than one row returned by a subquery used as an expression and in my head, this error makes perfect sense. The subquery is returning a list of spaces with the annotated-on total.
The example suggested that some sort of magic would happen and I'd end up with a number I could use. But that's not happening here? How do I annotate on aggregate Subquery data?
Hmm, something's being added to my query's SQL...
I built a new Carpark/Space model and it worked. So the next step is working out what's poisoning my SQL. On Laurent's advice, I took a look at the SQL and tried to make it more like the version they posted in their answer. And this is where I found the real problem:
SELECT "bookings_carpark".*, (SELECT COUNT(U0."id") AS "c"
FROM "bookings_space" U0
WHERE U0."carpark_id" = ("bookings_carpark"."id")
GROUP BY U0."carpark_id", U0."space"
)
AS "space_count" FROM "bookings_carpark";
I've highlighted it but it's that subquery's GROUP BY ... U0."space". It's retuning both for some reason. Investigations continue.
Edit 2: Okay, just looking at the subquery SQL I can see that second group by coming through ☹
In [12]: print(Space.objects_standard.filter().values('carpark').annotate(c=Count('*')).values('c').query)
SELECT COUNT(*) AS "c" FROM "bookings_space" GROUP BY "bookings_space"."carpark_id", "bookings_space"."space" ORDER BY "bookings_space"."carpark_id" ASC, "bookings_space"."space" ASC
Edit 3: Okay! Both these models have sort orders. These are being carried through to the subquery. It's these orders that are bloating out my query and breaking it.
I guess this might be a bug in Django but short of removing the Meta-order_by on both these models, is there any way I can unsort a query at querytime?
*I know I could just annotate a Count for this example. My real purpose for using this is a much more complex filter-count but I can't even get this working.
Shazaam! Per my edits, an additional column was being output from my subquery. This was to facilitate ordering (which just isn't required in a COUNT).
I just needed to remove the prescribed meta-order from the model. You can do this by just adding an empty .order_by() to the subquery. In my code terms that meant:
from django.db.models import Count, OuterRef, Subquery
spaces = Space.objects.filter(carpark=OuterRef('pk')).order_by().values('carpark')
count_spaces = spaces.annotate(c=Count('*')).values('c')
Carpark.objects.annotate(space_count=Subquery(count_spaces))
And that works. Superbly. So annoying.
It's also possible to create a subclass of Subquery, that changes the SQL it outputs. For instance, you can use:
class SQCount(Subquery):
template = "(SELECT count(*) FROM (%(subquery)s) _count)"
output_field = models.IntegerField()
You then use this as you would the original Subquery class:
spaces = Space.objects.filter(carpark=OuterRef('pk')).values('pk')
Carpark.objects.annotate(space_count=SQCount(spaces))
You can use this trick (at least in postgres) with a range of aggregating functions: I often use it to build up an array of values, or sum them.
I just bumped into a VERY similar case, where I had to get seat reservations for events where the reservation status is not cancelled. After trying to figure the problem out for hours, here's what I've seen as the root cause of the problem:
Preface: this is MariaDB, Django 1.11.
When you annotate a query, it gets a GROUP BY clause with the fields you select (basically what's in your values() query selection). After investigating with the MariaDB command line tool why I'm getting NULLs or Nones on the query results, I've came to the conclusion that the GROUP BY clause will cause the COUNT() to return NULLs.
Then, I started diving into the QuerySet interface to see how can I manually, forcibly remove the GROUP BY from the DB queries, and came up with the following code:
from django.db.models.fields import PositiveIntegerField
reserved_seats_qs = SeatReservation.objects.filter(
performance=OuterRef(name='pk'), status__in=TAKEN_TYPES
).values('id').annotate(
count=Count('id')).values('count')
# Query workaround: remove GROUP BY from subquery. Test this
# vigorously!
reserved_seats_qs.query.group_by = []
performances_qs = Performance.objects.annotate(
reserved_seats=Subquery(
queryset=reserved_seats_qs,
output_field=PositiveIntegerField()))
print(performances_qs[0].reserved_seats)
So basically, you have to manually remove/update the group_by field on the subquery's queryset in order for it to not have a GROUP BY appended on it on execution time. Also, you'll have to specify what output field the subquery will have, as it seems that Django fails to recognize it automatically, and raises exceptions on the first evaluation of the queryset. Interestingly, the second evaluation succeeds without it.
I believe this is a Django bug, or an inefficiency in subqueries. I'll create a bug report about it.
Edit: the bug report is here.
Problem
The problem is that Django adds GROUP BY as soon as it sees using an aggregate function.
Solution
So you can just create your own aggregate function but so that Django thinks it is not aggregate. Just like this:
total_comments = Comment.objects.filter(
post=OuterRef('pk')
).order_by().annotate(
total=Func(F('length'), function='SUM')
).values('total')
Post.objects.filter(length__gt=Subquery(total_comments))
This way you get the SQL query like this:
SELECT "testapp_post"."id", "testapp_post"."length"
FROM "testapp_post"
WHERE "testapp_post"."length" > (SELECT SUM(U0."length") AS "total"
FROM "testapp_comment" U0
WHERE U0."post_id" = "testapp_post"."id")
So you can even use aggregate subqueries in aggregate functions.
Example
You can count the number of workdays between two dates, excluding weekends and holidays, and aggregate and summarize them by employee:
class NonWorkDay(models.Model):
date = DateField()
class WorkPeriod(models.Model):
employee = models.ForeignKey(User, on_delete=models.CASCADE)
start_date = DateField()
end_date = DateField()
number_of_non_work_days = NonWorkDay.objects.filter(
date__gte=OuterRef('start_date'),
date__lte=OuterRef('end_date'),
).annotate(
cnt=Func('id', function='COUNT')
).values('cnt')
WorkPeriod.objects.values('employee').order_by().annotate(
number_of_word_days=Sum(F('end_date__year') - F('start_date__year') - number_of_non_work_days)
)
Hope this will help!
A solution which would work for any general aggregation could be implemented using Window classes from Django 2.0. I have added this to the Django tracker ticket as well.
This allows the aggregation of annotated values by calculating the aggregate over partitions based on the outer query model (in the GROUP BY clause), then annotating that data to every row in the subquery queryset. The subquery can then use the aggregated data from the first row returned and ignore the other rows.
Performance.objects.annotate(
reserved_seats=Subquery(
SeatReservation.objects.filter(
performance=OuterRef(name='pk'),
status__in=TAKEN_TYPES,
).annotate(
reserved_seat_count=Window(
expression=Count('pk'),
partition_by=[F('performance')]
),
).values('reserved_seat_count')[:1],
output_field=FloatField()
)
)
If I understand correctly, you are trying to count Spaces available in a Carpark. Subquery seems overkill for this, the good old annotate alone should do the trick:
Carpark.objects.annotate(Count('spaces'))
This will include a spaces__count value in your results.
OK, I have seen your note...
I was also able to run your same query with other models I had at hand. The results are the same, so the query in your example seems to be OK (tested with Django 1.11b1):
activities = Activity.objects.filter(event=OuterRef('pk')).values('event')
count_activities = activities.annotate(c=Count('*')).values('c')
Event.objects.annotate(spaces__count=Subquery(count_activities))
Maybe your "simplest real-world example" is too simple... can you share the models or other information?
"works for me" doesn't help very much. But.
I tried your example on some models I had handy (the Book -> Author type), it works fine for me in django 1.11b1.
Are you sure you're running this in the right version of Django? Is this the actual code you're running? Are you actually testing this not on carpark but some more complex model?
Maybe try to print(thequery.query) to see what SQL it's trying to run in the database. Below is what I got with my models (edited to fit your question):
SELECT (SELECT COUNT(U0."id") AS "c"
FROM "carparks_spaces" U0
WHERE U0."carpark_id" = ("carparks_carpark"."id")
GROUP BY U0."carpark_id") AS "space_count" FROM "carparks_carpark"
Not really an answer, but hopefully it helps.

Efficiently select latest items of different categories

Consider the following model:
class Data(Model):
created_at = models.DateTimeField()
category = models.CharField(max_length=7)
I want to select the latest object for all categories.
Following this question, i'm selecting the distinct categories and then making a separate query for each of them:
categories = Data.objects.distinct('category').values_list('category', flat=True)
for category in categories:
latest_obj = Data.objects.filter(category=category).latest('created_at')
The downside of the approach is that it makes lots of queries (1 for the distinct categories, and then a separate query per category).
Is there a way to do this with a single query?
Typically, you would use a group by in relational database. Django has an aggergation API
(https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/aggregation/#aggregation) which allows you to do the following:
from django.db.models import Max
Data.objects.values('category').annotate(latest=Max('created_at'))
This will perform a single query and return a list like this:
[{'category' : 'cat1', 'latest' : '01/01/01' },{'category' : 'cat2' 'latest' : '02/02/02' }]
But I guess you might want to retrieve the data record id as well within this list. Django does not make thinks simple for you in this case. The problem is django uses all fields in the value clause to make the grouping and you cannot return extra columns from the query.
EDIT: I originally proposed to add a second values() clause to the end of the query based on web resources but this does not add extra columns to the result set.

Django distinct foreign keys for use in another model

class Log:
project = ForeignKey(Project)
msg = CharField(...)
date = DateField(...)
I want to select the four most recent Log entries where each Log entry must have a unique project foreign key. I've tried the solutions on google search but none of them works and the django documentation isn't that very good for lookup..
I tried:
id_list = Log.objects.order_by('-date').values_list('project_id').distinct()[:4]
entries = Log.objects.filter(id__in=id_list)
id_list is empty unless I remove the order_by() but then it's not in the correct order.
entries = Log.objects.filter(id__in=id_list)
The objects in entries is not in the same order as in id_list because when you use Mysql function IN() it will not sort the result by the input order ... How to do it in django?
It looks like it is impossible to achieve what you want with django orm. Documentation states that is not possible to use order_by along with distinct.
However there might be another way to solve it. Maybe you could select Project objects, and annotate them with latest log entries.
Here's a single-query solution (but it will probably be too slow):
Log.objects.filter(project__log__date__gte=F('date')).annotate(c=Count('project__log')).filter(c__lte=4).order_by('project', 'c')
I think that Skirmantas is right and you have to do it in a more complex way:
from django.db.models import Max
projects = Project.objects.annotate(last_logged=Max('log__date')).order_by('-last_logged')[:4]
log_entries = [proj.log_set.order_by('-date')[0] for proj in projects]

Select DISTINCT individual columns in django?

I'm curious if there's any way to do a query in Django that's not a "SELECT * FROM..." underneath. I'm trying to do a "SELECT DISTINCT columnName FROM ..." instead.
Specifically I have a model that looks like:
class ProductOrder(models.Model):
Product = models.CharField(max_length=20, promary_key=True)
Category = models.CharField(max_length=30)
Rank = models.IntegerField()
where the Rank is a rank within a Category. I'd like to be able to iterate over all the Categories doing some operation on each rank within that category.
I'd like to first get a list of all the categories in the system and then query for all products in that category and repeat until every category is processed.
I'd rather avoid raw SQL, but if I have to go there, that'd be fine. Though I've never coded raw SQL in Django/Python before.
One way to get the list of distinct column names from the database is to use distinct() in conjunction with values().
In your case you can do the following to get the names of distinct categories:
q = ProductOrder.objects.values('Category').distinct()
print q.query # See for yourself.
# The query would look something like
# SELECT DISTINCT "app_productorder"."category" FROM "app_productorder"
There are a couple of things to remember here. First, this will return a ValuesQuerySet which behaves differently from a QuerySet. When you access say, the first element of q (above) you'll get a dictionary, NOT an instance of ProductOrder.
Second, it would be a good idea to read the warning note in the docs about using distinct(). The above example will work but all combinations of distinct() and values() may not.
PS: it is a good idea to use lower case names for fields in a model. In your case this would mean rewriting your model as shown below:
class ProductOrder(models.Model):
product = models.CharField(max_length=20, primary_key=True)
category = models.CharField(max_length=30)
rank = models.IntegerField()
It's quite simple actually if you're using PostgreSQL, just use distinct(columns) (documentation).
Productorder.objects.all().distinct('category')
Note that this feature has been included in Django since 1.4
User order by with that field, and then do distinct.
ProductOrder.objects.order_by('category').values_list('category', flat=True).distinct()
The other answers are fine, but this is a little cleaner, in that it only gives the values like you would get from a DISTINCT query, without any cruft from Django.
>>> set(ProductOrder.objects.values_list('category', flat=True))
{u'category1', u'category2', u'category3', u'category4'}
or
>>> list(set(ProductOrder.objects.values_list('category', flat=True)))
[u'category1', u'category2', u'category3', u'category4']
And, it works without PostgreSQL.
This is less efficient than using a .distinct(), presuming that DISTINCT in your database is faster than a python set, but it's great for noodling around the shell.
Update:
This is answer is great for making queries in the Django shell during development. DO NOT use this solution in production unless you are absolutely certain that you will always have a trivially small number of results before set is applied. Otherwise, it's a terrible idea from a performance standpoint.