SQLAlchemy Obtain Primary Key With Autoincrement Before Commit

Question

When I have created a table with an auto-incrementing primary key, is there a way to obtain what the primary key would be (that is, do something like reserve the primary key

Answer 1

You don't need to commit, you just need to flush. Here's some sample code. After the call to flush you can access the primary key that was assigned. Note this is with SQLAlchemy v1.3.6 and Python 3.7.4.

from sqlalchemy import *
import sqlalchemy.ext.declarative

Base = sqlalchemy.ext.declarative.declarative_base()

class User(Base):
    __tablename__ = 'user'
    user_id = Column('user_id', Integer, primary_key=True)
    name = Column('name', String)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    import unittest
    from sqlalchemy.orm import *
    import datetime

    class Blah(unittest.TestCase):
        def setUp(self):
            self.engine = create_engine('sqlite:///:memory:', echo=True)
            self.sessionmaker = scoped_session(sessionmaker(bind=self.engine))
            Base.metadata.bind = self.engine
            Base.metadata.create_all()
            self.now = datetime.datetime.now()

        def test_pkid(self):
            user = User(name="Joe")
            session = self.sessionmaker()
            session.add(user)
            session.flush()
            print('user_id', user.user_id)
            session.commit()
            session.close()

    unittest.main()