How do you catch this exception?

Question

If your related model is called Foo you can just do:

except Foo.DoesNotExist:

Django is amazing when it's not terrifying. RelatedObjectDoesNotExist is a property that returns a type that is figured out dynamically at runtime. That type uses self.field.rel.to.DoesNotExist as a base class.

According to Django documentation:

DoesNotExist

exception Model.DoesNotExist

This exception is raised by the ORM when an expected object is not found. For example, QuerySet.get() will raise it when no object is found for the given lookups.

Django provides a DoesNotExist exception as an attribute of each model class to identify the class of object that could not be found, allowing you to catch exceptions for a particular model class.

The exception is a subclass of django.core.exceptions.ObjectDoesNotExist.

This is the magic that makes that happen. Once the model has been built up, self.field.rel.to.DoesNotExist is the does-not-exist exception for that model.

If you don't want to import the related model class, you can:

except MyModel.related_field.RelatedObjectDoesNotExist:

or

except my_model_instance._meta.model.related_field.RelatedObjectDoesNotExist:

where related_field is the field name.

To catch this exception in general, you can do

from django.core.exceptions import ObjectDoesNotExist

try:
    # Your code here
except ObjectDoesNotExist:
    # Handle exception

The RelatedObjectDoesNotExist exception is created dynamically at runtime. Here is the relevant code snippet for the ForwardManyToOneDescriptor and ReverseOneToOneDescriptor descriptors:

@cached_property
def RelatedObjectDoesNotExist(self):
    # The exception can't be created at initialization time since the
    # related model might not be resolved yet; `self.field.model` might
    # still be a string model reference.
    return type(
        'RelatedObjectDoesNotExist',
        (self.field.remote_field.model.DoesNotExist, AttributeError),
        {}
    )

So the exception inherits from <model name>.DoesNotExist and AttributeError. In fact, the complete MRO for this exception type is:

[<class 'django.db.models.fields.related_descriptors.RelatedObjectDoesNotExist'>, 
<class '<model module path>.DoesNotExist'>,
<class 'django.core.exceptions.ObjectDoesNotExist'>,
<class 'AttributeError'>,
<class 'Exception'>,
<class 'BaseException'>,
<class 'object'>]

The basic takeaway is you can catch <model name>.DoesNotExist, ObjectDoesNotExist (import from django.core.exceptions) or AttributeError, whatever makes the most sense in your context.

Little bit late but helpful for others.

2 ways to handle this.

1st :

When we need to catch exception

>>> from django.core.exceptions import ObjectDoesNotExist
>>> try:
>>>     p2.restaurant
>>> except ObjectDoesNotExist:
>>>     print("There is no restaurant here.")
There is no restaurant here.

2nd: When don't want to handle exception

>>> hasattr(p2, 'restaurant')
False