Select a single field from a foreign key

Question

So I have a a very simple (simplified) model

class MyObject(models.Model):
    owning_user = models.ForeignKey(User, null=True)

Now in one

Answer 1

If you use my_object.owning_user_id instead of my_object.owning_user, then Django will use the id instead of looking up the user.

In this case, you only need the id, but if you needed other user attributes, you could use select_related. In the view, you would do:

foo.my_object_set.select_related('user')

In the template, you don't have as much control, since you can't pass arguments.

{{ foo.my_object_set.select_related }}