ORM to avoid deferring the reference_id of a prefetch

[Thiago Bellini Ribeiro]

Suppose that I have a User and an Email models, and they are related through Email.user_id

If I query User like this:

User.objects.prefetch_related("email_set", Email.objects.only("email"))

I'll see n+1 issues either way, as user_id was deferred, and the ORM will need to refetch the object from the database.

Although the fix for this is easy, just changing this to:

User.objects.prefetch_related("email_set", Email.objects.only("user_id", "email"))

It can catch some users off-guard, as it is not so obvious that the ORM will not do "the correct thing".

Based on that, I was wondering if maybe the ORM could force the reference_id of a relation to not be deferred when it is used in a Prefetch object, the same way it already does with pk. It makes sense to me at least.

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On a side note, this caused some unexpected behavior at work today, as we were fixing RemovedInDjango50Warnings and the simple addition of chunk_size to an .iterator() with a Prefetch caused some Model.DoesNotExist issues.

After digging for a while I found out about this issue, which means our prefetch_related was being thrown into the trash, but also because the iteration was taking some time to happen (very large table), some related objects got deleted in the meantime, and when the ORM tried to refresh_from_db to get the related id, it failed with that error.