@timgraham I noticed there's a similar au/a confusion in test_in_bulk_non_unique_field, although it doesn't amount to much since it's an error condition. Does it make sense to fix in this PR?

I changed it at first before realizing that test uses field_name="author".

But I think it's still supposed be an Article instance, which is a model with an author field (that is not distinct).

When you specify field_name, the id_list (first argument of in_bulk()) is a list of the values of the field, e.g. Blog.objects.in_bulk(["beatles_blog"], field_name="slug"). So if we're querying author, then id_list must contain authors (or author ids).

Yep, but we're querying Article, no?

We have field_name="author" so we're querying articles by authors.

Article.objects.in_bulk([self.au1], field_name="author")

Or it could be written ([self.a1.author])

Article.objects.in_bulk([self.a1], field_name="author") would match an article id to author ids.

(One and two letter variable names don't help!!)

Thanks for the catch and the patient explanations! 🎯