id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc	stage	has_patch	needs_docs	needs_tests	needs_better_patch	easy	ui_ux
214	[patch] Allow selecting individual fields in SQL SELECT statements via the models API	rmunn@…	Adrian Holovaty	"A common request on IRC recently has been ""How do I do SELECT DISTINCT field FROM table""? The models API currently doesn't have any way to allow this: it will only do the equivalent of SELECT *.

After discussing this on the django-developers list (http://groups-beta.google.com/group/django-developers/browse_thread/thread/488194de26e0ce18/), I've written a patch to add two functions to the models API at the module level: get_values() and get_values_iterator(). They act exactly like the get_list() and get_iterator() functions, but instead of returning a list (or iterator) of model API objects, they return a list (or iterator) of dictionaries. They also allow a new keyword parameter, ""fields"", which is a list (or tuple) of field names to return from the SELECT.

Thus, with the following patch, doing ""SELECT DISTINCT year, month FROM blog ORDER BY year ASC, month ASC"" would be written ""results = blog.get_values(fields=['year','month'], order_by=['year','month'], distinct=True)""."	enhancement	closed	Metasystem		normal	fixed			Unreviewed	1	0	0	0	0	0