Django backward relationship lookup

I often limit the lookup to fields of the model and forget about backward relations.

Consider the following relationship:

class Group(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)

class Student(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    group = models.ForeignKey(Group)

A group can have many students.

We want to get the groups based on certain conditions on model Student. An example is getting the groups which contain a student named ‘stud1’. If you can get it using model Group and without using Student, you can skip this post.

In such a scenario, we tend to use Student model. It’s more intuitive because the Foreign Key relationship exists from Student to Group.

Let’s load the following data to test our queries:

group1 = Group.objects.create(name='Group 1')
group1 = Group.objects.create(name='Group 2')
Student.objects.create(name='stud1', group=group1)
Student.objects.create(name='stud2', group=group1)
Student.objects.create(name='stud3', group=group1)
Student.objects.create(name='stud1', group=group2)

Get the groups which contain student named stud1.

Intuitive way:

We first try to get all the students which satisfy the criteria. Query for that would be:

Student.objects.filter(name='stud1')

And then we try to get the groups of those students. If we use the Student model, we can’t get a queryset of Group. So our approach would be to first get the ids of desired groups and then get a queryset of Group using those ids.

group_ids = Student.objects.filter(name='stud1').values_list('group', flat=True)
groups = Group.objects.filter(id__in=group_ids)

Less obvious way:

What if we could use the Group model directly?

Group.objects.filter(student__name='stud1')

This gives the exact same result as given by the Intuitive way.

So, even though there is no field called student on Group and we didn’t specify any relationship to Student from Group, Django is smart enough to figure out the relationship for us.

Get the groups with name Group1 which contain students named stud1

Intuitive way:

group_ids = Student.objects.filter(name='stud1', group__name='Group1').values_list('group', flat=True)
groups = Group.objects.filter(id__in=group_ids)

Less obvious way:

groups = Group.objects.filter(name='Group1', student__name='stud1')

Gives the exact same result as given by preceding two queries.

I always missed the backward relationship while following Django tutorial or whenever I read the docs. I tried finding it while writing this post to see if the docs missed mentioning it. I was wrong yet again, there is a section which mentions it.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/queries/#lookups-that-span-relationships

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