In a Django Rest Framework view, does request.user make a database call or the database call happens before the request reaches the view?

Question

I need to retrieve some information about my users and I am trying to avoid making unnecessary database calls.

The information I need is stored in three models: User, UserProfile and Membership.

Both UserProfile and Membership have a OneToOne relationship with the User model.

I know that I can use select_related() to retrieve related models from the database in a single call. So I could do something like:

User.objects.select_related('userprofile').select_related('membership').get(id=request.user.id)

But that must not be correct, because if I am using some user information to do the query, it means I already retrieved this information in a previous call.

So what would be the best way to get this information minimising database calls? Would it be even possible to get the information from these 3 models in a single call?

neverwalkaloner · Answer

DRF performs user related DB query inside authentication class. See source here. So if you need to optimize this query you should implement custom autentication class(see details here), override authenticate_credentials method and use optimized query inside it.

In a Django Rest Framework view, does request.user make a database call or the database call happens before the request reaches the view?

1 Answers