Hi Luke, On Oct 3, 9:04 am, Luke Plant <l.plant...@cantab.net> wrote: > The patch for this is now ready, as far as I'm concerned, but I'd like > to bring it up here again before committing, mainly because Alex Gaynor > expressed some doubts. > > The latest patch is on the ticket: > > https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/16937
I know I'm a bit late to the party here (had a work deadline last Friday). I think this functionality is valuable and makes sense to have in the ORM, thanks for all the work on it. Though I don't have time to go through the patch in detail, it seems like its gotten several pairs of eyes over it closely already. My only real concern is one I'm a bit surprised hasn't been raised already: API and naming sanity. If I'm a new user coming to this API, as far as I'm concerned "select_related" and "prefetch_related" may as well be synonyms - they don't tell me anything useful about how the functions differ. And even knowing the internal details, any justification for the naming seems tortured at best: both methods use selects, and both prefetch something that would otherwise have to be fetched separately later. Given that this and select_related operate on entirely disjoint sets of fields, is there a good technical reason not to simply merge this functionality into select_related? Sure, the underlying implementation is quite different, but philosophically the ORM doesn't generally aim to be a transparent reflection of what's happening at the SQL layer, it aims to present a coherent object API. At that level I think select_related and prefetch_related are pretty much indistinguishable from each other. A note in the docs that using select_related on an m2m will result in an extra query (but many fewer than if you didn't use it and iterated over the m2m related objects for each row!) seems to me a quite adequate nod to the implementation difference. As the builder of the bikeshed, you get to paint it, so if you've already considered all this and haven't come up with any better API naming options, I'll withdraw my concern. But it seems to me it's at least worth some public discussion before locking ourselves into an API. Carl -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers" group. To post to this group, send email to django-developers@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers?hl=en.
