Make reference fields a proxy to allow access to field.id without dereferencing

[rozza]

When looking at any other value then trigger a dereference either directly or on the list.

refs: #61

[thedug]

Has anybody started this?

[rozza]

I havent started 0.9 development yet

[Fraggle]

Just to let you know, I'm interested in this feature as well.

[lwcolton]

+1 for this

[thedug]

Is 0.9 still in the works or is mongoengine stalled?

[bsherry]

+1 This would be a great addition for things like uniqueness checks in a list of referenceField's

[bond777]

+1

[MRigal]

Definitely a good optimization to have ! But I would rather release a 0.9 now and postpone this to a new release

[MRigal]

And it might be a good idea to have #490 in mind while implementing the concept for this issue

[smcclstocks]

Are we able to access a referencefield to obtain the ID & avoid the dereference overhead yet? Thanks.

+1

[computmaxer]

+1

[codekiln]

+1

[pchristos]

+1

[wojcikstefan]

We've implemented this (among many other things) in my company's fork of this package (https://github.com/closeio/mongoengine#mongomallard). I'll try to move the performance improvements (including this one) over to this package.

PS GitHub has added reactions to their UI now (https://github.com/blog/2119-add-reactions-to-pull-requests-issues-and-comments) so that we don't need to create "+1" comments.

[mclate]

This is very needed update. Is there any progress on this one? (Also wonder if it would be possible to check whether field is a reference proxy like it was possible to check via isinstance(field, DBRef)?)

[djrochford]

+1

[NoahStapp]

Is this still an issue? LazyReferenceField and the no_dereference context manager have both been added since this was reported. LazyReferenceField in particular appears to specifically call out this use case of wanting to access an id of a ReferenceField value without dereferencing the entire object.