so I started working with Django recently, I’m having a case of many-to-many relationship between Book and Author -as simple example- a book could have multiple authors.

class Book(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    authors = models.ManyToManyField('Author', related_name='books')

    def __str__(self):
        return self.title

class Author(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=50)

    def __str__(self):
        return self.name

My goal is to fetch the data of Book, but the problem is when a book has multiple authors, I get the same book row for each of its authors, the question is can I have a book row with all its authors stored in a list ? instead of a row for each author.

Example of data fetching as JSON:

[
    {
        "id": 1,
        "title": "Good Omens",
        "authors__name": "Neil Gaiman"
    },
    {
        "id": 1,
        "title": "Good Omens",
        "authors__name": "Terry Pratchett"
    },
    {
        "id": 2,
        "title": "The Lord of the Rings",
        "authors__name": "J.R.R. Tolkien"
    }
]

So I want something like this instead:

    {
        "id": 1,
        "title": "Good Omens",
        "authors__name": ["Neil Gaiman", "Terry Pratchett"]
    },

While it’s easy to implement this via python code, I want a solution using model queries or ORM methods, to gain some performance and time since the data will be so big.

The following code shows a method responsible to get the data and to do some ordering and filtering, all using queries:

def __model_query(self, model_class, fields=None, enum_fields=None, order_by=None, search=None, field_search=None):
        queryset = model_class.objects.all()

        # Apply ordering if specified
        if order_by:
            field_name, sort_order = order_by
            if sort_order == "desc":
                queryset = queryset.order_by(f"-{field_name}")
            elif sort_order == "asc":
                queryset = queryset.order_by(field_name)

        # Apply general search if specified
        if search:
            search_filters = Q()
            for field in fields:
                search_filters |= Q(**{f"{field}__icontains": search})
            
            queryset = queryset.filter(search_filters)

        # Apply field-specific search if specified
        if field_search:
            search_filters = Q()
            for field, value in field_search.items():
                if enum_fields and field in enum_fields:
                    search_filters |= Q(**{f"{field}__exact": value})
                else:
                    search_filters |= Q(**{f"{field}__icontains": value})
            
            queryset = queryset.filter(search_filters)

        return queryset

I’m using sqlite3 db currently so I can’t use any method related to Postgres db.

I really thank you who ever can help me with this, I hope I provided all the details needed.

I didn’t try much solutions, just ones provided by ChatGPT but they are all failed.