Django ORM – Inserting, Updating & Deleting Data

Django lets us interact with its database models, i.e. add, delete, modify and query objects, using a database-abstraction API called ORM(Object Relational Mapper). This article discusses all the useful operations we can perform using Django ORM.

For demonstration purposes, we will use the following Django models.

class Album(models.Model): 
    title = models.CharField(max_length = 30) 
    artist = models.CharField(max_length = 30) 
    genre = models.CharField(max_length = 30) 
  
    def __str__(self): 
        return self.title 
  
class Song(models.Model): 
    name = models.CharField(max_length = 100) 
    album = models.ForeignKey(Album, on_delete = models.CASCADE) 
  
    def __str__(self): 
        return self.name

We can access the Django ORM by running the following command inside our project directory.

python manage.py shell

This brings us to an interactive Python console. Assuming that our models exist in myProject/albums/models.py we can import our models using the following command:

>>> from books.models import Song, Album

To create an object of model Album and save it into the database, we need to write the following command:

>>> a = Album(title = "Divide", artist = "Ed Sheeran", genre = "Pop")
>>> a.save()

To create an object of model Song and save it into the database, we need to write the following command:

>>> s = Song(name = "Castle on the Hill", album = a)
>>> s.save()

Let us add 2 more Albums records for the sake of demonstration.

>>> a = Album(title = "Abbey Road", artist = "The Beatles", genre = "Rock")
>>> a.save()
>>> a = Album(title = "Revolver", artist = "The Beatles", genre = "Rock")
>>> a.save()

To retrieve all the objects of a model, we write the following command:

>>> Album.objects.all()
< QuerySet [ < Album: Divide>, < Album: Abbey Road>, < Album: Revolver>]>

The output is a QuerySet, or a set of objects that match the query. Notice that the name printed is the output of the __str__() function.

We can also filter queries using the functions filter(), exclude() and get(). The filter() function returns a QuerySet having objects that match the given lookup parameters.

>>> Album.objects.filter(artist = "The Beatles")
< QuerySet [< Album: Abbey Road>, < Album: Revolver>]>

The exclude() function returns a QuerySet having objects other than those matching the given lookup parameters.

>>> Album.objects.exclude(genre = "Rock")
< QuerySet [< Album: Divide>]>

The get() function returns a single object which matches the given lookup parameter. It gives an error when the query returns multiple objects.

>>> Album.objects.get(pk = 3)
< QuerySet [< Album: Revolver>]>

We can modify an existing object as follows:

>>> a = Album.objects.get(pk = 3)
>>> a.genre = "Pop"
>>> a.save()

To delete a single object, we need to write the following commands:

>>> a = Album.objects.get(pk = 2)
>>> a.delete()
>>> Album.objects.all()
< QuerySet [< Album: Divide >, < Album: Revolver>]>

To delete multiple objects, we can use filter() or exclude() functions as follows:

>>> Album.objects.filter(genre = "Pop").delete()
>>> Album.objects.all()
< QuerySet [ ]>