Django filter queryset on “tuples” of values for multiple columns

Question

Say I have a model:

Class Person(models.Model):
    firstname = models.CharField()
    lastname = models.CharField()
    birthday = models.DateField()
    # etc.         


        

Answer 1

bruno's answer works, but it feels dirty to me - both on the Python level and on the SQL level (a large concatenation of ORs). In MySQL at least, you can use the following SQL syntax:

SELECT id FROM table WHERE (first_name, last_name) IN
       (('John','Doe'),('Jane','Smith'),('Bill','Clinton'))

Django's ORM doesn't provide a direct way to do this, so I use raw SQL:

User.objects.raw('SELECT * FROM table WHERE (first_name, last_name) IN %s',
      [ (('John','Doe'),('Jane','Smith'),('Bill','Clinton')) ])

(This is a list with one element, matching the single %s in the query. The element is an iterable of tuples, so the %s will be converted to an SQL list of tuples).

Notes:

1. As I said, this works for MySQL. I'm not sure what other backends support this syntax.
2. A bug in python-mysql, related to this behavior, was fixed in November 2013 / MySQLdb 1.2.4, so make sure your Python MySQLdb libraries aren't older than that.