Check if an object exists

Question

I need to check if Model.objects.filter(...) turned up anything, but do not need to insert anything. My code so far is:

user_pass = log_in(request.POST)  # form class if user_pass.is_valid():     cleaned_info = user_pass.cleaned_data     user_object = User.objects.filter(email = cleaned_info['username']) 

Answer 1

I think the easiest from a logical and efficiency point of view is using the queryset's exists() function, documented here:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/stable/ref/models/querysets/#django.db.models.query.QuerySet.exists

So in your example above I would simply write:

if User.objects.filter(email = cleaned_info['username']).exists():     # at least one object satisfying query exists else:     # no object satisfying query exists 

Answer 2

Since filter returns a QuerySet, you can use count to check how many results were returned. This is assuming you don't actually need the results.

num_results = User.objects.filter(email = cleaned_info['username']).count() 

After looking at the documentation though, it's better to just call len on your filter if you are planning on using the results later, as you'll only be making one sql query:

A count() call performs a SELECT COUNT(*) behind the scenes, so you should always use count() rather than loading all of the record into Python objects and calling len() on the result (unless you need to load the objects into memory anyway, in which case len() will be faster).

num_results = len(user_object)