Django Query with Prefetch Related Returns Unexpected Results on Many-to-Many Relationship
After trying multiple solutions online, I still can't figure this out. I'm working through a tutorial and I've been struggling with this for a few days now and could really use some help... I'm working with an scenario with Django's `prefetch_related` when trying to retrieve data from a many-to-many relationship. I have two models, `Author` and `Book`, where `Book` has a many-to-many relationship with `Author`. The question arises when I try to fetch books along with their authors but end up with unexpected duplicates in the result set. Here’s a simplified version of my models: ```python class Author(models.Model): name = models.CharField(max_length=100) class Book(models.Model): title = models.CharField(max_length=100) authors = models.ManyToManyField(Author) ``` I want to get all books along with their authors using the following query: ```python books = Book.objects.prefetch_related('authors').all() ``` When I iterate through the books and print the authors, I see duplicates, like so: ```python for book in books: print(book.title) for author in book.authors.all(): print(author.name) ``` Output: ``` Book A Author 1 Author 2 Author 1 Book B Author 1 ``` I have checked the database and confirmed that the authors for each book are correctly set. My Django version is 3.2.8. I've also tried using `distinct()` on the authors queryset, but it doesn't change the output. Is there something I’m overlooking here, or is there a specific technique to avoid duplicates when using `prefetch_related`? Any insights would be greatly appreciated! Has anyone else encountered this? My development environment is Windows 11. This issue appeared after updating to Python stable.