Tip: How to get a single object`s value with Django ORM

There are times when you want to get a single field of a single object in the database. For example, just get the headline of the blog post #1, not fetching it’s body. How do you do it in a usual way?

>>> BlogPost.objects.only('headline').get(pk=1).headline
'Hello world'

# Or maybe even this way:
>>> BlogPost.objects.values('headline').filter(pk=1)[0]['headline']
'Hello world'

Recently I’ve stumbled upon a shorter one:

>>> BlogPost.objects.values_list('headline', flat=True).get(pk=1)
'Hello world'

As you can see, the trick is to chain values() and get() calls. You may say “It’s undocumented”. Hah, face it, it already is! :)

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