hmarr
? Is there a way to tell if refernce field has been de-referenced?
What triggers mongoengine to de-reference a document? Is there a way to see if a particular reference attribute has been de-referenced?
for example. say i had a document Foo that has a property "bar" that is a reference to a Bar document.
Foo has a method on it "has_valid_bar" that checks some small property buried inside the Bar document.
Say that Bar is a fairly big document, and somewhere is my buisness logic it may have already been de-referenced, I would used the Bar object to calculate whether it's a valid bar for that function, BUT if it hasnt been de-referenced and I call 'has_valid_bar', i dont really need to de-reference the whole Bar object, I can make a more optimized db call to perform that check.
Is there any way to determine if it has or has not been de-referenced? Does my explanation make sense?
I used (assuming obj is your document), isinstance(obj._data.get(field_name), DBRef) to check if the field has been dereferenced. If isinstance() returns True, is has not been dereferenced. If it has been dereferenced, you should get an instance of your model instead.
