[django] Django ManyToMany filter()

I have a model:

class Zone(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=128)
    users = models.ManyToManyField(User, related_name='zones', null=True, blank=True)

And I need to contruct a filter along the lines of:

u = User.objects.filter(...zones contains a particular zone...)

It has to be a filter on User and it has to be a single filter parameter. The reason for this is that I am constructing a URL querystring to filter the admin user changelist: http://myserver/admin/auth/user/?zones=3

It seems like it should be simple but my brain isn't cooperating!

Note that if the user may be in multiple zones used in the query, you may probably want to add .distinct(). Otherwise you get one user multiple times:

users_in_zones = User.objects.filter(zones__in=[zone1, zone2, zone3]).distinct()

another way to do this is by going through the intermediate table. I'd express this within the Django ORM like this:

UserZone = User.zones.through

# for a single zone
users_in_zone = User.objects.filter(
  id__in=UserZone.objects.filter(zone=zone1).values('user'))

# for multiple zones
users_in_zones = User.objects.filter(
  id__in=UserZone.objects.filter(zone__in=[zone1, zone2, zone3]).values('user'))

it would be nice if it didn't need the .values('user') specified, but Django (version 3.0.7) seems to need it.

the above code will end up generating SQL that looks something like:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE id IN (SELECT user_id FROM userzones WHERE zone_id IN (1,2,3))

which is nice because it doesn't have any intermediate joins that could cause duplicate users to be returned