Question

How can I add a field for the count of objects in a database. I have the following models:

class Item(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField()

class Contest(models.Model);
    name = models.CharField()

class Votes(models.Model):
    user = models.ForeignKey(User)
    item = models.ForeignKey(Item)
    contest = models.ForeignKey(Contest)
    comment = models.TextField()

To find the votes for contestA I am using the following query in my view

current_vote = Item.objects.filter(votes__contest=contestA)

This returns a queryset with all of the votes individually but I want to get the count votes for each item, anyone know how I can do that? thanks

Answer 1

To get the number of votes for a specific item, you would use:

vote_count = Item.objects.filter(votes__contest=contestA).count()

If you wanted a break down of the distribution of votes in a particular contest, I would do something like the following:

contest = Contest.objects.get(pk=contest_id)
votes   = contest.votes_set.select_related()

vote_counts = {}

for vote in votes:
  if not vote_counts.has_key(vote.item.id):
    vote_counts[vote.item.id] = {
      'item': vote.item,
      'count': 0
    }

  vote_counts[vote.item.id]['count'] += 1

This will create dictionary that maps items to number of votes. Not the only way to do this, but it’s pretty light on database hits, so will run pretty quickly.