An equivalent of Django's select_related for ManyToMany and OneToMany relationships

A Common Pitfall

With Django, the most classic problem occurs while accessing objects relations attributes inside a loop. That's why QuerySet's method select_related() exists : it will join specified relations so that access to their attributes does not hit the database. Refer to Django's documentation for more information !

One-To-Many and Many-To-Many Relationships

select_related() is not able to follow One-To-Many (1-n) and Many-To-Many (n-n) relationships. The Django team is currently working on prefetch_related(). But before we can enjoy this future feature, we can implement an equivalent in python.

With these models :

class Pizza(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)

class Restaurant(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)
    pizzas = models.ManyToManyField(Pizza, through='PizzaRestaurant')

class PizzaRestaurant(models.Model):
    pizza = models.ForeignKey(Pizza)
    restaurant = models.ForeignKey(Restaurant)
    price = models.FloatField()

This loop will generate 1 + N queries :

for restaurant in Restaurant.objects.all():
    for pizza in restaurant.pizzas.all():
        print pizza.name

Whereas this one will only generate 2 queries :

# Store relationships in a dict
byrestaurant = {}
for pr in PizzaRestaurant.objects.select_related('restaurant', 'pizza').all():
    byrestaurant.setdefault(pr.restaurant.id, []).append(pr.pizza)
# Use stored lists
for restaurant in Restaurant.objects.all():
    for pizza in byrestaurant[restaurant.id]:
        print pizza.name

According to the amount of N, doing that trick in views can boost your pages !

This is not perfect and elegant, but if it allows you to downsize the number of queries from several thousands to fifteen, like it did on Memopol2, you can think twice.