python - how to get a value out of ValuesQuerySet

Question

I'm trying to extract some data from my database in my Django app with the following line of code. Job is the name of my model and jobIDs[i] represents the id of the record being operated on.

timeToRun = Job.objects.filter(id=jobIDs[i]).values()['whenToRun'].split(' ')[0]

When I get to ['whenToRun'] I get a TypeError(). Am I misunderstanding how to access values in this kind of dict?

EDIT: To clarify, .values() return a ValuesQuerySet

Answer 1

Probably this is what you are looking for:

timeToRun = Job.objects.filter(id=jobIDs[i]).values()[0]['whenToRun'].split(' ')[0]

From the documentation values() is a ValueQuerySet (a list of queryset objects)

Now, if Job.objects.filter(id=jobIDs[i]) returns empty queryset, it would throw an error, so I would do:

if Job.objects.filter(id=jobIDs[i]).exists(): #a quick lookup
    timeToRun = Job.objects.filter(id=jobIDs[i]).values()[0]['whenToRun'].split(' ')[0]

One more level of optimization:

if Job.objects.filter(id=jobIDs[i]).exists(): #a quick lookup
    timeToRun = list(Job.objects.filter(id=jobIDs[i]).values_list('whenToRun', flat=True))[0].split(' ')[0]