Query by example in Django

Introduction

This is a quick hack, but I’m throwing it out there in case anyone knows of a better solution (or better yet, if I’m missing something obvious in the standard distribution).

The Hibernate ORM for Java includes a query-by-example facility: you create a template object, setting the relevant fields to the values you’re interested in, then it retrieves all records that match that template (fields left un-set are ignored in the query).

To the best of my knowledge, the Django ORM doesn’t support this style of querying. I found myself wanting it though,1 and this post is what I came up with.

Implementation

The implementation is fairly simple: we use the meta attribute to get the list of fields, and create a filter query from all non-None fields. As simplification, I’m currently ignoring non-direct fields and many-many fields (in part because the object I was working with hadn’t been saved yet). The id is also skipped, because of course that should be unique!

class QBEManager(Manager):
    """A custom manager that adds query-by-example functionality (inspired
    by Hibernate)"""
    def similar_to(self, template):
        """Find all objects that have fields matching those in the template
        object.  Fields that are set to None are ignored."""
        vals = {}
        for f in template._meta.get_all_field_names():
            _,_,direct,m2m = template._meta.get_field_by_name(f)
            if not direct or m2m or f == 'id':
                continue
            val = getattr(template, f, None)
            if val is not None:
                vals[f] = val

        return super(QBEManager, self).get_query_set().filter(**vals)

Then it can be used just like a regular manager:

class Config(Model):
    # ...
    objects = QBEManager()

Using it anger is up to you:

def some_view(request):
    # ...
    c = Config()
    c.start_time = datetime.date(2012, 3, 27)
    c.length = 5
    # get all configs that start on 27/3/2013 and have length 5:
    matching_configs = Config.objects.similar_to(c)

Improvements

This solved my problem, but it’s probably not fit for prime-time just yet. In particular, handling many-many fields could be added for objects that are already saved (and hence are able to have m2m fields established).

It is probably also better off written as a mixin; in particular, my case was actually based off a GeoManager, and a mixin would enable both base managers to be used. Something like:

class QBEManagerMixin(object):
    # ...

class QBEManager(QBEManagerMixin, Manager): # ...
class QBEGeoManager(QBEManagerMixin, GeoManager): # ...

  1. Specifically, I had a configuration model pre-populated, and wanted to find if there was an existing result for that configuration. Basically I wanted caching, but there were reasons that view caching (or even the low-level cache API) were not appropriate. ↩︎


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