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 22014 `prefetch_related` recursion protection does not cover all cases StillNewb nobody "This issue related to #17014 Commit (see line 1655): https://github.com/django/django/commit/64da8eec3077eaaba5cfa62775523da772f4de44#diff-5b0dda5eb9a242c15879dc9cd2121379R1655 == Summary: == `prefetch_related` collects additional prefetch lookups made by querysets that are created during prefetching, and handle them to in addition to lookups defined by user. Sometimes it can casue infinite recursion, so for preventing that, there needed some mechanism that ensures that prefetches that was already done, would not be performed again. == Problems in the code: == Now that mechanism stores descriptors of relational fields and checks against them every iteration. Python descriptor is shared against instances of classes. So descriptor represents relational field of model, not field of instance. For same relation and different sets of instances there are different prefetch queries, so descriptors cant be used as identifiers for facts that lookup was already prefetched. And I also would add that passing descriptors around is very much unpythonic and not healthy practice in general. Descriptors are advanced properties, they must serve for same purpose as properties - hiding some logic in attribute assigment/deletion/retrieving. Reason here - is to identify lookups while traversing data relationships and never repeat them. In code this reason is not well exporessed: * There is `done_queries` and `followed_descriptors` - two places for same thing. * Check is against descriptors, but in `done_queries` lookup paths is being added. * Check against lookup type (auto lookup or normal) is redundant, there is no difference between auto-lookups and normal lookups in matter of which allowed to spam, they must be checked for which was already done uniformly. **Specific problem** is in the check condition for adding in `done_lookups` - `not (lookup in auto_lookups and descriptor in followed_descriptors)` - intention here was ""if this is not autolookup, descriptor for which is already seen, and presumably lookup path for it was added to done_queries - not adding it to done_queries. So autolookup-spam will be stopped"". But what if descriptor for field, throug lookup-spam assumed to flow, was already added while performing different lookup with different data/parameters? If that lookup will be autolookup - it will never be added to done_queries and would be allowed to be performed infinity number of times. There is too much unneeded complexity in that code. ps. Ive made the patch with two tests." Bug closed Database layer (models, ORM) dev Normal needsinfo prefetch Accepted 0 0 0 0 0 0