Sqlalchemy: secondary relationship update

Question

I have two tables, say A and B. Both have a primary key id. They have a many-to-many relationship, SEC.

SEC = Table(\'sec\', Base.metadata,
    Column(\'a_id\',          


        

Answer 1

The problem is you want to make sure the instances you create are unique. We can create an alternate constructor that checks a cache of existing uncommited instances or queries the database for existing commited instance before returning a new instance.

Here is a demonstration of such a method:

from sqlalchemy import Column, Integer, String, ForeignKey, Table
from sqlalchemy.engine import create_engine
from sqlalchemy.ext.declarative.api import declarative_base
from sqlalchemy.orm import sessionmaker, relationship

engine = create_engine('sqlite:///:memory:', echo=True)
Session = sessionmaker(engine)
Base = declarative_base(engine)

session = Session()


class Role(Base):
    __tablename__ = 'role'

    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    name = Column(String, nullable=False, unique=True)

    @classmethod
    def get_unique(cls, name):
        # get the session cache, creating it if necessary
        cache = session._unique_cache = getattr(session, '_unique_cache', {})
        # create a key for memoizing
        key = (cls, name)
        # check the cache first
        o = cache.get(key)
        if o is None:
            # check the database if it's not in the cache
            o = session.query(cls).filter_by(name=name).first()
            if o is None:
                # create a new one if it's not in the database
                o = cls(name=name)
                session.add(o)
            # update the cache
            cache[key] = o
        return o


Base.metadata.create_all()

# demonstrate cache check
r1 = Role.get_unique('admin')  # this is new
r2 = Role.get_unique('admin')  # from cache
session.commit()  # doesn't fail

# demonstrate database check
r1 = Role.get_unique('mod')  # this is new
session.commit()
session._unique_cache.clear()  # empty cache
r2 = Role.get_unique('mod')  # from database
session.commit()  # nop

# show final state
print session.query(Role).all()  # two unique instances from four create calls

The create_unique method was inspired by the example from the SQLAlchemy wiki. This version is much less convoluted, favoring simplicity over flexibility. I have used it in production systems with no problems.

There are obviously improvements that can be added; this is just a simple example. The get_unique method could be inherited from a UniqueMixin, to be used for any number of models. More flexible memoizing of arguments could be implemented. This also puts aside the problem of multiple threads inserting conflicting data mentioned by Ants Aasma; handling that is more complex but should be an obvious extension. I leave that to you.