Error handling in Python-MySQL

Question

I am running a little webservice based on python flask, where I want to execute a small MySQL Query. When I get a valid input for my SQL query, everything is working as expe

Answer 1

First point: you have too much code in your try/except block. Better to use distinct try/except blocks when you have two statements (or two groups of statements) that may raise different errors:

try:
    try:
        curs.execute(sql)
        # NB : you won't get an IntegrityError when reading
    except (MySQLdb.Error, MySQLdb.Warning) as e:
        print(e)
        return None

    try: 
        user = curs.fetchone()[0]
        return user
    except TypeError as e:
        print(e)
        return None

finally:
    conn.close()

Now do you really have to catch a TypeError here ? If you read at the traceback, you'll notice that your error comes from calling __getitem__() on None (nb : __getitem__() is implementation for the subscript operator []), which means that if you have no matching rows cursor.fetchone() returns None, so you can just test the return of currsor.fetchone():

try:
    try:
        curs.execute(sql)
        # NB : you won't get an IntegrityError when reading
    except (MySQLdb.Error, MySQLdb.Warning) as e:
        print(e)
        return None

    row = curs.fetchone()
    if row:
        return row[0]
    return None

finally:
    conn.close()

Now do you really need to catch MySQL errors here ? Your query is supposed to be well tested and it's only a read operation so it should not crash - so if you have something going wrong here then you obviously have a bigger problem, and you don't want to hide it under the carpet. IOW: either log the exceptions (using the standard logging package and logger.exception()) and re-raise them or more simply let them propagate (and eventually have an higher level component take care of logging unhandled exceptions):

try:
    curs.execute(sql)
    row = curs.fetchone()
    if row:
        return row[0]
    return None

finally:
    conn.close()

And finally: the way you build your sql query is utterly unsafe. Use sql placeholders instead:

q = "%s%%" % data["email"].strip() 
sql = "select userid from oc_preferences where configkey='email' and configvalue like %s"
cursor.execute(sql, [q,])

Oh and yes: wrt/ the "View function did not return a response" ValueError, it's because, well, your view returns None in many places. A flask view is supposed to return something that can be used as a HTTP response, and None is not a valid option here.