The model has an IntegerField with null=True, blank=True, so it allows the field to have a value of None. When the column is sorted, the Nones are always treated as the lowest values. Is it possible to make Django treat them as the highest values? So when sorted in descending order, instead of:
100 43 7 None
It would go:
None 100 43 7
I realize I could assign an extremely high number instead of None, but for neatness' sake, I was wondering if there were any other options.
Thanks!
Daniel is correct in that the database determines the sort order, and different databases treat the ordering of NULLs differently. However, there are ways to get the DB to give you the order you want.
PostgreSQL is nice enough to actually allow you to append "NULLS FIRST" or "NULLS LAST" to your query (ref).
SELECT * FROM table_name ORDER BY int_field DESC NULLS FIRST;
For MySQL and SQLite, there's an alternative (which will also work in PostgreSQL), as described here. Essentially, if you want nulls last, you would do:
SELECT *, int_field IS NULL AS is_null FROM table_name ORDER BY is_null DESC, int_field DESC;
However, getting Django to execute these queries is a different story alltogether. In Django 1.2, model managers now have a raw() method, documented here, which returns a RawQuerySet, which is like a QuerySet, but can't be stacked (e.g. you can't add a filter() call in there). Of course, instead of stacking, you can just add your lookup parameters to the SQL. Whether or not this functionality is useful to you depends on what you're trying to accomplish. If you simply want to fetch your models in that order then pass the queryset to a view or something, you can do:
YourModel.objects.raw('SELECT *, int_field IS NULL AS is_null FROM table_name ORDER BY is_null DESC, int_field DESC')
If however you want this to be the default ordering for use in the admin and such, you'll need a different approach, perhaps via overriding the manager.
It's not Django that determines the sort order, but the database. And databases have their own rules about how to sort NULLs.
One (rather complicated) possibility would be to implement a custom field that uses a custom database type to sort in the correct order. The details of how you would do this are likely to depend on your database.
Since I'm using Django 1.1 and couldn't use raw(), the simplest way turned out to be to create a "int_sort" field, and populate it with the value of the IntegerField, unless it encountered a None, in which case it would take the value of sys.maxint.
Then, in admin.py, I set the admin_order_field to be the "int_sort" field.
Related
**
Difference between creating a foreign key for consistency and for joins
**
I am fine to use Foreignkey and Queryset API with Django.
I just want to understand little bit more deeply how it works behind the scenes.
In Django manual, it says
a database index is automatically created on the ForeignKey. You can
disable this by setting db_index to False. You may want to avoid the
overhead of an index if you are creating a foreign key for consistency
rather than joins, or if you will be creating an alternative index
like a partial of multiple column index.
creating for a foreign key for consistency rather than joins
this part is confusing me.
I expected that you use Join keyword if you do query with Foreign key like below.
SELECT
*
FROM
vehicles
INNER JOIN users ON vehicles.car_owner = users.user_id
For example,
class Place(models.Model):
name = models.Charfield(max_length=50)
address = models.Charfield(max_length=50)
class Comment(models.Model):
place = models.ForeignKeyField(Place)
content = models.Charfield(max_length=50)
if you use queryset like Comment.objects.filter(place=1), i expected using Join Keyword in low level SQL command.
but, when I checked it by printing out queryset.query in console, it showed like below.
(I simplified with Model just to explains. below, it shows all attributes in my model. you can ignore attributes)
SELECT
"bfm_comment"."id", "bfm_comment"."content", "bfm_comment"."user_id", "bfm_comment"."place_id", "bfm_comment"."created_at"
FROM "bfm_comment" WHERE "bfm_comment"."place_id" = 1
creating a foreign key for consistency vs creating a foreign key for joins
simply, I thought if you use any queryset, it means using foreign key for joins. Because you can get parent's table data by c = Comment.objects.get(id=1) c.place.name easily. I thought it joins two tables behind scenes. But result of Print(queryset.query) didn't how Join Keyword but Find it by Where keyword.
The way I understood from an answer
Case 1:
Comment.objects.filter(place=1)
result
SELECT
"bfm_comment"."id", "bfm_comment"."content", "bfm_comment"."user_id", "bfm_comment"."place_id", "bfm_comment"."created_at"
FROM "bfm_comment"
WHERE "bfm_comment"."id" = 1
Case 2:
Comment.objects.filter(place__name="df")
result
SELECT "bfm_comment"."id", "bfm_comment"."content", "bfm_comment"."user_id", "bfm_comment"."place_id", "bfm_comment"."created_at"
FROM "bfm_comment" INNER JOIN "bfm_place" ON ("bfm_comment"."place_id" = "bfm_place"."id")
WHERE "bfm_place"."name" = df
Case1 is searching rows which has comment.id column is 1 in just Comment table.
But in Case 2, it needs to know Place table's attribute 'name', so It has to use JOIN keyword to check values in column of Place table. Right?
So Is it alright to think that I create a foreign key for joins if i use queryset like Case2 and that it is better to create index on the Foreign Key?
for above question, I think I can take the answer from Django Manual
Consider adding indexes to fields that you frequently query using
filter(), exclude(), order_by(), etc. as indexes may help to speed up
lookups. Note that determining the best indexes is a complex
database-dependent topic that will depend on your particular
application. The overhead of maintaining an index may outweigh any
gains in query speed
In conclusion, it really depends on how my application work with it.
If you execute the following command the mystery will be revealed
./manage.py sqlmigrate myapp 0001
Take care to replace myapp with your app name (bfm I think) and 0001 with the actual migration where the Comment model is created.
The generated sql will reveal that the actual table is created with place_id int rather than a place Place that is because the RDBMS doesn't know anything about models, the models are only in the application level. It's the job of the django orm to fetch the data from the RDBMS and convert them into model instances. That's why you always get a place member in each of your Comment instances and that place member gives you access to the members of the related Place instance in turn.
So what happens when you do?
Comment.objects.filter(place=1)
Django is smart enough to know that you are referring to a place_id because 1 is obviously not an instance of a Place. But if you used a Place instance the result would be the same. So there is no join here. The above query would definitely benefit from having an index on the place_id, but it wouldn't benefit from having a foreign key constraint!! Only the Comment table is queried.
If you want a join, try this:
Comment.objects.filter(place__name='my home')
Queries of this nature with the __ often result in joins, but sometimes it results in a sub query.
Querysets are lazy.
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/topics/db/queries/#querysets-are-lazy
QuerySets are lazy – the act of creating a QuerySet doesn’t involve
any database activity. You can stack filters together all day long,
and Django won’t actually run the query until the QuerySet is
evaluated. Take a look at this example:
I wanted to know is there anything equivalent to:
select columnname from tablename
Like Django tutorial says:
Entry.objects.filter(condition)
fetches all the objects with the given condition. It is like:
select * from Entry where condition
But I want to make a list of only one column [which in my case is a foreign key]. Found that:
Entry.objects.values_list('column_name', flat=True).filter(condition)
does the same. But in my case the column is a foreign key, and this query loses the property of a foreign key. It's just storing the values. I am not able to make the look-up calls.
Of course, values and values_list will retrieve the raw values from the database. Django can't work its "magic" on a model which means you don't get to traverse relationships because you're stuck with the id the foreign key is pointing towards, rather than the ForeignKey field.
If you need to filters those values, you could do the following (assuming column_name is a ForeignKey pointing to MyModel):
ids = Entry.objects.values_list('column_name', flat=True).filter(...)
my_models = MyModel.objects.filter(pk__in=set(ids))
Here's a documentation for values_list()
To restrict a query set to a specific column(s) you use .values(columname)
You should also probably add distinct to the end, so your query will end being:
Entry.objects.filter(myfilter).values(columname).distinct()
See: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/querysets/#django.db.models.query.QuerySet.values
for more information
Depending on your answer in the comment, I'll come back and edit.
Edit:
I'm not certain if the approach is right one though. You can get all of your objects in a python list by getting a normal queryset via filter and then doing:
myobjectlist = map(lambda x: x.mycolumnname, myqueryset)
The only problem with that approach is if your queryset is large your memory use is going to be equally large.
Anyway, I'm still not certain on some of the specifics of the problem.
You have a model A with a foreign key to another model B, and you want to select the Bs which are referred to by some A. Is that right? If so, the query you want is just:
B.objects.filter(a__isnull = False)
If you have conditions on the corresponding A, then the query can be:
B.objects.filter(a__field1 = value1, a__field2 = value2, ...)
See Django's backwards relation documentation for an explanation of why this works, and the ForeignKey.related_name option if you want to change the name of the backwards relation.
Suppose you have a model Entry, with a field "author" pointing to another model Author. Suppose this field can be null.
If I run the following QuerySet:
Entry.objects.filter(author=X)
Where X is some value. Suppose in MySQL I have setup a compound index on Entry for some other column and author_id, ideally I'd like the SQL to just use "author_id" on the Entry model, so that it can use the compound index.
It turns out that Entry.objects.filter(author=5) would work, no join is done. But, if I say author=None, Django does a join with Author, then add to the Where clause Author.id IS NULL. So in this case, it can't use the compound index.
Is there a way to tell Django to just check the pk, and not follow the link?
The only way I know is to add an additional .extra(where=['author_id IS NULL']) to the QuerySet, but I was hoping some magic in .filter() would work.
Thanks.
(Sorry I was not clearer earlier about this, and thanks for the answers from lazerscience and Josh).
Does this not work as expected?
Entry.objects.filter(author=X.id)
You can either use a model or the model id in a foreign key filter. I can't check right yet if this executes a separate query, though I'd really hope it wouldn't.
If do as you described and do not use select_related() Django will not perform any join at all - no matter if you filter for the primary key of the related object or the related itself (which doesn't make any difference).
You can try:
print Entry.objects.(author=X).query
Assuming that the foreign key to Author has the name author_id, (if you didn't specify the name of the foreign key column for ForeignKey field, it should be NAME_id, if you specified the name, then check the model definition / your database schema),
Entry.objects.filter(author_id=value)
should work.
Second Attempt:
http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/querysets/#isnull
Maybe you can have a separate query, depending on whether X is null or not by having author__isnull?
Pretty late, but I just ran into this. I'm using Q objects to build up the query, so in my case this worked fine:
~Q(author_id__gt=0)
This generates sql like
NOT ("author_id" > 0 AND "author_id" IS NOT NULL)
You could probably solve the problem in this question by using
Entry.objects.exclude(author_id__gt=0)
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.
The short of it is, the table names of all queries that are inside a filter get renamed to u0, u1, ..., so my extra where clauses won't know what table to point to. I would love to not have to hand-make all the queries for every way I might subselect on this data, and my current workaround is to turn my extra'd queries into pk values_lists, but those are really slow and something of an abomination.
Here's what this all looks like. You can mostly ignore the details of what goes in the extra of this manager method, except the first sql line which points to products_product.id:
def by_status(self, *statii):
return self.extra(where=["""products_product.id IN
(SELECT recent.product_id
FROM (
SELECT product_id, MAX(start_date) AS latest
FROM products_productstatus
GROUP BY product_id
) AS recent
JOIN products_productstatus AS ps ON ps.product_id = recent.product_id
WHERE ps.start_date = recent.latest
AND ps.status IN (%s))""" % (', '.join([str(stat) for stat in statii]),)])
Which works wonderfully for all the situations involving only the products_product table.
When I want these products as a subselect, i do:
Piece.objects.filter(
product__in=Product.objects.filter(
pk__in=list(
Product.objects.by_status(FEATURED).values_list('id', flat=True))))
How can I keep the generalized abilities of a query set, yet still use an extra where clause?
At first: the issue is not totally clear to me. Is the second code block in your question the actual code you want to execute? If this is the case the query should work as expected since there is no subselect performed.
I assume so that you want to use the second code block without the list() around the subselect to prevent a second query being performed.
The django documentation refers to this issue in the documentation about the extra method. However its not very easy to overcome this issue.
The easiest but most "hakish" solution is to observe which table alias is produced by django for the table you want to query in the extra method. You can rely on the persistent naming of this alias as long as you construct the query always in the same fashion (you don't change the order of multiple extra methods or filter calls that cause a join).
You can inspect a query that will be execute in the DB queryset by using:
print Model.objects.filter(...).query
This will reveal the aliases that are used for the tables you want to query.
As of Django 1.11, you should be able to use Subquery and OuterRef to generate an equivalent query to your extra (using a correlated subquery rather than a join):
def by_status(self, *statii):
return self.filter(
id__in=Subquery(ProductStatus.values("product_id").filter(
status__in=statii,
product__in=Subquery(ProductStatus.objects.values(
"product_id",
).annotate(
latest=Max("start_date"),
).filter(
latest=OuterRef("start_date"),
).values("product_id"),
),
)
You could probably do it with Window expressions as well (as of Django 2.0).
Note that this is untested, so may need some tweaks.