Maintain uniqueness of a property in the NDB database

Question

An NDB model contains two properties: email and password. How to avoid adding to the database two records with the same email? NDB doe

Answer 1

This is something that I've come across as well and I settled on a variation of @Remko's solution. My main issue with checking for an existing entity with the given email is a potential race condition like op stated. I added a separate model that uses an email address as the key and has a property that holds a token. By using get_or_insert, the returned entities token can be checked against the token passed in and if they match then the model was inserted.

import os
from google.appengine.ext import ndb

class UniqueEmail(ndb.Model):
    token = ndb.StringProperty()

class User(ndb.Model):
    email = ndb.KeyProperty(kind=UniqueEmail, required=True)
    password = ndb.StringProperty(required=True)

def create_user(email, password):
    token = os.urandom(24)
    unique_email = UniqueEmail.get_or_insert(email,
                                             token=token)

    if token == unique_email.token:
        # If the tokens match, that means a UniqueEmail entity
        # was inserted by this process.
        # Code to create User goes here.
    # The tokens do not match, therefore the UniqueEmail entity
    # was retrieved, so the email is already in use.
    raise ValueError('That user already exists.')