How to Retrieve All Objects of a ManyToManyField in Django

In this article, we show how to retrieve all objects of a ManyToManyField in Django.

A ManyToManyField in Django is a field that allows multiple objects to be stored. This is useful and applicable for things such as shopping carts, where a user can buy multiple products.

To add an item to a ManyToManyField, we can use the add() function.

But how do we retrieve all of the objects from a ManyToManyField?

Let's say we have the following model shown below.

# models.py file class ShoppingCart(models.Model): user= models.OneToOneField(User) products= models.ManyToManyField(Product, blank=True)

So in the models.py file, above, we have a model, ShoppingCart, that contains 2 fields, with the products row being a ManyToManyField.

Now how do we get all of these items from the ManyToManyField?

We show this in the following code in the views.py file.

# views.py file from .models import ShoppingCart shoppingcartuser= ShoppingCart.objects.get(user= request.user) shoppingcartitems= shoppingcartuser.products.all()

So in this code, we have to import the model, ShoppingCart, because this is the model that contains the ManyToManyField we are trying to retrieve the items from.

So each ShoppingCart contains a user. We select the user (the row) of data we want to deal with and get this row. We can then retrieve all of the items from the ManyToManyField, products, from this row.

We retrieve all of the objects from the ManyToManyField, products, using the line, shoppingcartitems= shoppingcartuser.products.all()

template File

Lastly, we just have the template file to render.

So when we created the variable, shoppingcartitems, above, it returns a Queryset.

So if we went into the template file and put in the following.

# template file {{shoppingcartitems}}

The code above would return a QuerySet containing all of the objects from the ManyToManyField, products.

In order to return each result separately, we would use a for loop within the template file, such as that shown below.

# template file {% for item in shoppingcartitems %} {{item}}<br/> {% endfor %}

Now the above code prints out distinctly each object from the ManyToManyField.

And this is how we can retrieve all objects of a ManyToManyField in Django.

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