😸 A case for values

django python web

Here's the Scenario: I have a model (lets call it Contact) with two Foreign Keys, one of which is related to User in Django's contrib.auth app. I need to build a form that lets me select an existing object, and a new user.

class ContactType(Model):
    name = CharField(max_length=128)

class Contact(Model):
    user = ForeignKey(User)
    contact_type = ForeignKey(ContactType)
    # possibly more fields...

I need to select from existing models, so my first thought might be to build a form that uses two ModelChoiceField's. I also want to modify the way that my form displays each choice, so I could extend ModelChoiceField by overriding the label_from_instance method:

class UserModelChoiceField(ModelChoiceField):
    def label_from_instance(self, obj):
        return "%s (%s)"%(obj.get_full_name(), obj.username)

class ContactModelChoiceField(ModelChoiceField):
    def label_from_instance(self, obj):
        return '%s (%s)' % (obj.type, obj.user.get_full_name())

class CopyContactForm(forms.Form):
    contact = ContactModelChoiceField(Contact.objects.all())
    new_user = UserModelChoiceField(User.objects.all().order_by('first_name', 'last_name', 'username'))

This actually provides a solution to my original problem, but it's not very efficient. Notice that both the UserModelChoiceField and the ContactModelChoiceField call methods on each object with the latter accessing a foreign key. In an app with 600 Users and 600 Contacts, this form would generate around 1200 queries!

There's actually a very efficient way to generate the same sort of form using values_list, especially, when you realize that the form really just needs to contain something like the following:

<select>
<option value="1">John Doe</option>
<option value="2">Jane Doe</option>

</select>

So a more efficient solution to my problem looks something like the code below, which yields two queries.

class CopyContactForm(forms.Form):
    contact = forms.ChoiceField(choices=[(c[0], '%s (%s %s)'%(c[1],c[2],c[3])) \
        for c in Contact.objects.values_list('id', 'type__name', 'user__first_name', 'user__last_name')])
    new_user = forms.ChoiceField(choices=[(u[0], '%s %s (%s)'%(u[1],u[2],u[3])) \
        for u in User.objects.values_list('id', 'first_name', 'last_name', 'username')])

A case for values_list

Published on July 19, 2010, 4:25 p.m.