python - Django: Filter for get_foo_display in a Queryset

Question

I've been trying to filter a queryset on a simple model but with no luck so far.

Here is my model:

class Country(models.Model):
    COUNTRY_CHOICES = (
        ('FR', _(u'France')),
        ('VE', _(u'Venezuela')),
    )

    code = models.CharField(max_length=2, choices=COUNTRY_CHOICES)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.get_code_display()

And I would like to do something like:

Country.objects.filter(get_code_display__icontains="france")
Country.objects.filter(code__display__icontains="france")
Country.objects.filter(get_code_display__icontains="france")

But none of those above are working. How do you filter on a field that has a choices attribute? I thought the overridden __unicode__ would help but I guess I'm missing something.

Answer 1

You can't do this. filter works at the database level, and the database doesn't know anything about your long names. If you want to do filtering on a value, you need to store that value in the database.

An alternative is to translate the value back into the code, and filter on that:

country_reverse = dict((v, k) for k, v in COUNTRY_CHOICES)
Country.objects.filter(code=country_reverse['france'])