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Returning value from other class with help of relationship in flask

I'm struggling to set up a very simple relationship in flask.
I'm having one class called Transaction, and one called Instrument. Transaction has an attribute called name, and Instrument has two: name and name_ver2.
Now, when calling Transaction.name, I want it to return name_ver2 through the following process:
Name to look for: Transaction.name
Find: Instrument.name
Return: Instrument.name_ver2
where Instrument.name and Instrument.name are the keys that share the same value, and thus is used as the "shared" (mapping?) value.
The following does not work.
class Transaction(db.Model):
id = db.Column(db.Integer(), primary_key=True)
...
name = db.relationship('Instrument', lazy=True)
class Instrument(Transaction):
id = db.Column(db.Integer(), primary_key=True)
name = db.Column(db.String(length=10), nullable=False, unique=False)
name_ver2 = db.Column(db.String(length=10), nullable=False, unique=False)
Is this possible using relationships, or is there another type of functionality that I'm missing?

Working with back_populates fields in flask-admin and sqlalchemy

Consider a simple many-to-one model like this:
class Entity(Base):
__tablename__ = 'entity'
id = Column(Integer, Sequence('entity_seq'), primary_key=True)
name = Column(String(50), nullable=False)
persons = relationship('Person', back_populates='entity')
def __str__(self):
return self.name
class Person(Base):
__tablename__ = 'person'
id = Column(Integer, Sequence('person_seq'), primary_key=True)
entity_key = Column(ForeignKey('entity.id'), nullable=False)
last_name = Column(String(30), nullable=False)
first_name = Column(String(30), nullable=False)
entity = relationship('Entity', back_populates='persons')
def __str__(self):
return f'{self.first_name} {self.last_name}'
In other words, many persons belong to one entity.
If you use a flask-admin view like this:
admin.add_view(ModelView(Entity, db.session))
You might get a list like this:
Editing one of these entries can produce this output:
This presents some problems:
The persons field can be very large and take a long time to fill and probably needs to be paginated, but I can't find a way in flask-admin to cause that pagination.
Individual persons can be deleted (via the "x") but that violates the database nullable constraint on the column. It seems like flask-admin shouldn't allow that by default, or there should be a way to control it.
The persons are formatted via the __str__ attribute, but it may be necessary to format them some other way, but I can't find a way in flask-admin to do that.
What do you do in flask-admin to address these problems?

SQL Alchemy Error when moving colums to init method

This is my User object that I'm using to write to MySQL using SQLAlchemy
class User(Base):
def __init__(self):
self.id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
self.first_name = Column(String)
self.last_name = Column(String)
self.email_id = Column(String)
self.mobile = Column(String)
self.username = Column(String)
self.hashed_password = Column(String)
def set_first_name(self, first_name):
self.first_name = first_name
def set_last_name(self, last_name):
self.last_name = last_name
def set_email_id(self, email):
self.email_id = email
def set_mobile(self, mobile):
self.mobile = mobile
def set_username(self, username):
self.username = username
def set_hashed_password(self, password):
self.hashed_password = password
def __repr__(self):
return "<User(id=%d, first_name=%s, last_name=%s, email_id=%s, mobile=%s, username=%s)>"%(self.id, self.first_name, self.last_name, self.email_id, self.mobile, self.username)
When I run the program, this is what I get the following error,
sqlalchemy.exc.ArgumentError: Mapper Mapper|User|user could not assemble any primary key columns for mapped table 'user'
This code works if I take the attribute definitions out of the init and remove the self prefix. Can someone help me understand what's going on here?

SQLAlchemy's declarative base mechanism establishes a Python metaclass. That means that SQLAlchemy will specially process the definition of your class.
The purpose of that processing is to construct an sqlalchemy.orm.Mapper for each mapped class. That mapper represents the mapping between your database tables and your class.
In order to do that, SQLAlchemy generally needs to be able to find a primary key. This is required in order to define the identity associated with each mapped instance, so that mapped objects can be cached/found in sessions. That at least needs to be possible when your mapped class is constructed.
That means that you need to define the column of at least the primary key on the class.
Other answers have explained that much, although I think I've provided a bit more detail.
There is a more fundamental problem though.
id = Column(Integer, primary_key = True)
is of course a call to the Column function you import from SQLAlchemy. However, the return from the Column function is a schema item. This schema item is converted by declarative base into a descriptor similar to the kind of descriptor that the property decorator gives you. Such descriptors only work on a class, not an instance of that class.
Let's say I have a class mapped to a table called User and an instance of that user in a variable bob.
User.id
Is a description of the identity column. However
bob.id
is the number that identifies Bob in the users table.
That is, columns aren't intended to be assigned to members of self, they are intended to be assigned to classes.
So:
You need to have at least the primary key column on your class when you define it.
It's generally a good idea to have all your Columns there.
You can add a Column definition to your class later, although things will only work if you arrange for that column to get into your table
It's always wrong to add a Column to an instance of a mapped class. self.x = Column is always wrong.

The SQLAlchemy ORM (almost) always requires a primary key. You have indeed defined one inside your __init__() function. The problem is that __init__() doesn't get called until you create a User object. I assume you create your database before a User object ever gets created. Thus as far as the SQLAlchemy ORM is concerned, a primary key does not exist for User (nor any of the other attributes declared inside __init__).
The solution, as I think you already found from your last line, is to declare them as class attributes where as soon you do something like from models import User the attributes are defined and SQLAlchemy can properly build your User table.
class User(Base):
id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
first_name = Column(String)
last_name = Column(String)
email_id = Column(String)
mobile = Column(String)
username = Column(String)
hashed_password = Column(String)
def set_first_name(self, first_name):
self.first_name = first_name
...

You don't have to declare the column definitions inside the __init__() function. Change your class definition to something like this and it should work:
class User(Base):
__tablename__ = "user"
id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
first_name = Column(String)
last_name = Column(String)
email_id = Column(String)
mobile = Column(String)
username = Column(String)
hashed_password = Column(String)

sqlalchemy polymorphism without discriminators

I am trying to use an external library which defines a class model in my own program. I want the classes I define to be the same in all respects to their parents from the library, except that I want to append some helper methods to my local extensions. For example:
External Library:
Base = declarative_base()
class BaseUser(Base):
__tablename__ = 'user'
email = Column(String(100), nullable=False, unique=True)
password = Column(String(128), nullable=False)
address_uid = Column(Integer, ForeignKey('address.uid'))
address = relationship('BaseAddress', back_populates="users")
def __init__(self, **kwargs):
super().__init__(**kwargs)
self.address = BaseAddress()
class BaseAddress(Base):
__tablename__ = 'address'
street = Column(String(100))
unit = Column(String(32))
city = Column(String(64))
state = Column(String(32))
postal = Column(String(32))
country = Column(String(32))
users = relationship('user', back_populates="address")
Local model:
class User(BaseUser):
def in_country(county):
return self.address.country == country
class Address(BaseAddress):
pass
The goal here is to create subclasses which sqlalchemy need not distinguish from their parents. If I insert an Address into User.address, for example, sqlalchemy should not complain about a type mismatch (Address instead of the expected BaseAddress).
The only way of doing this that I can discern would involve using polymorphic_on in the parent classes. I don't want to do this, because it doesn't accurately model what is happening. It would require a discriminator, and it might behave strangely in the event I used a migration script locally. Is there a way with sqlalchemy to achieve polymorphism (I think it's called "ad-hoc polymorphism") without using discriminators, or some other way of achieving my goal?
UPDATE
I believe I could get part of the way there by using enable_typechecks=False on the relationships. However, this doesn't exactly get me what I want. I'd like to be able to do things like User.query() and get back a User rather than a BaseUser.

slqlachemy joined load by variable declaration

Suppose I got two models. Account and Question.
class Account(DeclarativeBase):
__tablename__ = 'accounts'
id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
user_name = Column(Unicode(255), unique=True, nullable=False)
and my Question model be like:
class Question(DeclarativeBase):
__tablename__ = 'questions'
id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
content = Column(Unicode(2500), nullable=False)
account_id = Column(Integer, ForeignKey(
'accounts.id', onupdate='CASCADE', ondelete='CASCADE'), nullable=False)
account = relationship('Account', backref=backref('questions'))
I got a method that returns a question in json format from the provided question ID.
when the method is like this below, it only returns the id the content and the account_id of the question.
#expose('json')
def question(self, question_id):
return dict(questions=DBSession.query(Question).filter(Question.id == question_id).one())
but I need the user_name of Account to be included in the json response too. something weird (at least to me) is that I have to explicitly tell the method that the query result contains a relation to an Account and this way the account info will be included in the json response: I mean doing something like this
#expose('json')
def question(self, question_id):
result = DBSession.query(Question).filter(Question.id == question_id).one()
weird_variable = result.account.user_name
return dict(question=result)
why do I have to do such thing? what is the reason behind this?

From Relationship Loading Techniques:
By default, all inter-object relationships are lazy loading.
In other words in its default configuration the relationship account does not actually load the account data when you fetch a Question, but when you access the account attribute of a Question instance. This behaviour can be controlled:
from sqlalchemy.orm import joinedload
DBSession.query(Question).\
filter(Question.id == question_id).\
options(joinedload('account')).\
one()
Adding the joinedload option instructs the query to load the relationship at the same time with the parent, using a join. Other eager loading techniques are also available, their possible use cases and tradeoffs discussed under "What Kind of Loading to Use?"