How to cache a paginated Django queryset

Question

How do you cache a paginated Django queryset, specifically in a ListView?

I noticed one query was taking a long time to run, so I\'m attempting to cache it. The queryset

Answer 1

You can extend the Paginator to support caching by a provided cache_key.

A blog post about usage and implementation of a such CachedPaginator can be found here. The source code is posted at djangosnippets.org (here is a web-acrhive link because the original is not working).

However I will post a slightly modificated example from the original version, which can not only cache objects per page, but the total count too. (sometimes even the count can be an expensive operation).

from django.core.cache import cache
from django.utils.functional import cached_property
from django.core.paginator import Paginator, Page, PageNotAnInteger


class CachedPaginator(Paginator):
    """A paginator that caches the results on a page by page basis."""
    def __init__(self, object_list, per_page, orphans=0, allow_empty_first_page=True, cache_key=None, cache_timeout=300):
        super(CachedPaginator, self).__init__(object_list, per_page, orphans, allow_empty_first_page)
        self.cache_key = cache_key
        self.cache_timeout = cache_timeout

    @cached_property
    def count(self):
        """
            The original django.core.paginator.count attribute in Django1.8
            is not writable and cant be setted manually, but we would like
            to override it when loading data from cache. (instead of recalculating it).
            So we make it writable via @cached_property.
        """
        return super(CachedPaginator, self).count

    def set_count(self, count):
        """
            Override the paginator.count value (to prevent recalculation)
            and clear num_pages and page_range which values depend on it.
        """
        self.count = count
        # if somehow we have stored .num_pages or .page_range (which are cached properties)
        # this can lead to wrong page calculations (because they depend on paginator.count value)
        # so we clear their values to force recalculations on next calls
        try:
            del self.num_pages
        except AttributeError:
            pass
        try:
            del self.page_range
        except AttributeError:
            pass

    @cached_property
    def num_pages(self):
        """This is not writable in Django1.8. We want to make it writable"""
        return super(CachedPaginator, self).num_pages

    @cached_property
    def page_range(self):
        """This is not writable in Django1.8. We want to make it writable"""
        return super(CachedPaginator, self).page_range

    def page(self, number):
        """
        Returns a Page object for the given 1-based page number.

        This will attempt to pull the results out of the cache first, based on
        the requested page number. If not found in the cache,
        it will pull a fresh list and then cache that result + the total result count.
        """
        if self.cache_key is None:
            return super(CachedPaginator, self).page(number)

        # In order to prevent counting the queryset
        # we only validate that the provided number is integer
        # The rest of the validation will happen when we fetch fresh data.
        # so if the number is invalid, no cache will be setted
        # number = self.validate_number(number)
        try:
            number = int(number)
        except (TypeError, ValueError):
            raise PageNotAnInteger('That page number is not an integer')

        page_cache_key = "%s:%s:%s" % (self.cache_key, self.per_page, number)
        page_data = cache.get(page_cache_key)

        if page_data is None:
            page = super(CachedPaginator, self).page(number)
            #cache not only the objects, but the total count too.
            page_data = (page.object_list, self.count)
            cache.set(page_cache_key, page_data, self.cache_timeout)
        else:
            cached_object_list, cached_total_count = page_data
            self.set_count(cached_total_count)
            page = Page(cached_object_list, number, self)

        return page