Django select only rows with duplicate field values

Question

suppose we have a model in django defined as follows:

class Literal:
    name = models.CharField(...)
    ...

Name field is not unique, and thus can have duplicate values. I need to accomplish the following task: Select all rows from the model that have at least one duplicate value of the name field.

I know how to do it using plain SQL (may be not the best solution):

select * from literal where name IN (
    select name from literal group by name having count((name)) > 1
);

So, is it possible to select this using django ORM? Or better SQL solution?

Answer 1

Try:

from django.db.models import Count
Literal.objects.values('name')
               .annotate(Count('id')) 
               .order_by()
               .filter(id__count__gt=1)

This is as close as you can get with Django. The problem is that this will return a ValuesQuerySet with only name and count. However, you can then use this to construct a regular QuerySet by feeding it back into another query:

dupes = Literal.objects.values('name')
                       .annotate(Count('id'))
                       .order_by()
                       .filter(id__count__gt=1)
Literal.objects.filter(name__in=[item['name'] for item in dupes])

Answer 2

This was rejected as an edit. So here it is as a better answer

dups = (
    Literal.objects.values('name')
    .annotate(count=Count('id'))
    .values('name')
    .order_by()
    .filter(count__gt=1)
)

This will return a ValuesQuerySet with all of the duplicate names. However, you can then use this to construct a regular QuerySet by feeding it back into another query. The django ORM is smart enough to combine these into a single query:

Literal.objects.filter(name__in=dups)

The extra call to .values('name') after the annotate call looks a little strange. Without this, the subquery fails. The extra values tricks the ORM into only selecting the name column for the subquery.

Answer 3

try using aggregation

Literal.objects.values('name').annotate(name_count=Count('name')).exclude(name_count=1)

Answer 4

In case you use PostgreSQL, you can do something like this:

from django.contrib.postgres.aggregates import ArrayAgg
from django.db.models import Func, Value

duplicate_ids = (Literal.objects.values('name')
                 .annotate(ids=ArrayAgg('id'))
                 .annotate(c=Func('ids', Value(1), function='array_length'))
                 .filter(c__gt=1)
                 .annotate(ids=Func('ids', function='unnest'))
                 .values_list('ids', flat=True))

It results in this rather simple SQL query:

SELECT unnest(ARRAY_AGG("app_literal"."id")) AS "ids"
FROM "app_literal"
GROUP BY "app_literal"."name"
HAVING array_length(ARRAY_AGG("app_literal"."id"), 1) > 1

Answer 5

If you want to result only names list but not objects, you can use the following query

repeated_names = Literal.objects.values('name').annotate(Count('id')).order_by().filter(id__count__gt=1).values_list('name', flat='true')