Select distinct values from a table field

Question

I\'m struggling getting my head around the Django\'s ORM. What I want to do is get a list of distinct values within a field on my table .... the equivalent of one of the fol

Answer 1

Say your model is 'Shop'

class Shop(models.Model):
    street = models.CharField(max_length=150)
    city = models.CharField(max_length=150)

    # some of your models may have explicit ordering
    class Meta:
        ordering = ('city')

Since you may have the Meta class ordering attribute set, you can use order_by() without parameters to clear any ordering when using distinct(). See the documentation under order_by()

If you don’t want any ordering to be applied to a query, not even the default ordering, call order_by() with no parameters.

and distinct() in the note where it discusses issues with using distinct() with ordering.

To query your DB, you just have to call:

models.Shop.objects.order_by().values('city').distinct()

It returns a dictionnary

or

models.Shop.objects.order_by().values_list('city').distinct()

This one returns a ValuesListQuerySet which you can cast to a list. You can also add flat=True to values_list to flatten the results.

See also: Get distinct values of Queryset by field