On Sat, 8 Oct 2011 16:30:37 -0500
Javier Guerra Giraldez <jav...@guerrag.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 8, 2011 at 8:18 AM, Michal Petrucha <michal.petru...@ksp.sk> 
> wrote:
> > Behind the scenes, Django does a JOIN. Its type (INNER od LEFT OUTER)
> > is decided based on whether the left-hand column (your ForeignKey
> > field) is allowed to be NULL or not.
> 
> the weird part, is that is takes the same choice on reverse
> relationships, which isn't necessarily appropriate.
> 
> for example, model A has a foreign key to B.  when reading A records
> with select_related, it makes sense that if the FK is NULLable, it
> uses a LEFT OUTER join while if it's not NULLable, use an INNER join.
> when I have a B object, it's _really_ handy to have the reverse
> relationship set up for me; but what if i want to select those B
> objects that doesn't have any A?
> 
> this works...
> 
>   B.objects.filter(a_set__isnull=True)
> 
> but only if the FK from A to B has the null=True argument.
> 
> and if I want to make the FK from A to B non-NULLable?  maybe an A
> record doesn't make any sense without B, but B without any A does.  so
> i don't put (null=True); so in the query above, i get an INNER join
> followed by the condition that a.id IS NULL, and the result set is
> empty.  :-(
> 
> the only solution i've found is to make the FK NULLable, even when it
> doesn't make sense.  I'd love to see a separate reverse_null=True
> argument (by default reverse_null==null) on the FK, that would make
> the reverse join a LEFT OUTER one while still prohibiting an A record
> without B.
> 
> am i missing something?

This is part of the erroneous behavior fixed by a proposed patch to #16715 [1]. 
In this ticket, several other model relations lead to the wrong join type. Not 
having reverse relations be null-able is one of the observations.

Maybe you, or some other developer, can review the proposed patch for this 
problem? The part of this mail, making reverse relations null-able is the more 
trivial part of the patch, and essentially a one-liner in 
django/db/models/sql/compiler.py. "new_nullable = f.null or None" in line 674 – 
as of r16928 – should be "new_nullable = True" since reverse relations should 
always be considered null-able. See the proposed patch (#16715) for details.

Sebastian.

[1] https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/16715

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