Django get id of user who is not current user

Question

I have searched for answers to this problem and there are many for how to get the id of the logged in user, all that is need in the template is {{ user.id}}. I have an author name for a post in a forum, {{ item.author }}. This author is not the logged in user. Is it possible to get that author's id without having to do a query in the view?

I did try using a foreign key to relate the topicmodel and the user model but this is giving me problems with a form I have in which a topic and a post are saved together. I am not created the instance cotrrectly. Here is the view that I can't get to work,

def topic_form(request):
    if request.method == "POST":
        userInstance = get_object_or_404(User, username = request.user)
        Tform = TopicForm(request.POST)
        Pform = PostForm(request.POST, instance=userInstance)
        if Tform.is_valid() and Pform.is_valid():
            tform = Tform.save(commit=False)
            tform.topicAuthor = request.user
            tform.author = userInst #this needs to be a user instance
            tform.save() #returns request and id
            pform = Pform.save(commit=False)
            pform.topic = tform
            pform.author = request.user
            pform.pub_date = timezone.now()
            pform.save()
            return redirect('init')
    else:
        topicform = TopicForm()
        postform = PostForm()
    return render(request, 'new_topic.html', {'topicform': topicform, 'postform': postform})

These are the models

class TopicModel(models.Model):
    topic = models.CharField(max_length = 100)
    topicAuthor = models.CharField(max_length = 100)
    author = models.ForeignKey(User, related_name = 'id_of_author')
    views = models.PositiveIntegerField(default = 0)

    def __str__(self):              # __unicode__ on Python 2
            return self.topic

class PostModel(models.Model):
    post = HTMLField(blank = True, max_length = 1000)
    pub_date = models.DateTimeField('date published')
    author = models.CharField(max_length = 30)
    topic = models.ForeignKey(TopicModel, related_name = 'posts')

    def __str__(self):              # __unicode__ on Python 2
            return self.post

Answer 1

我假设作者与用户有关系。

{{item.author.user.id}}