SQLAlchemy declarative syntax with autoload (reflection) in Pylons

Question

I would like to use autoload to use an existings database. I know how to do it without declarative syntax (model/_init_.py):

def init_model(engine):         


        

Answer 1

Check out the Using SQLAlchemy with Pylons tutorial on how to bind metadata to the engine in the init_model function.

If the meta.Base.metadata.bind(engine) statement successfully binds your model metadata to the engine, you should be able to perform this initialization in your own init_model function. I guess you didn't mean to skip the metadata binding in this function, did you?

Answer 2

I just tried this using orm module.

Base = declarative_base(bind=engine)

Base.metadata.reflect(bind=engine)

Accessing tables manually or through loop or whatever:

Base.metadata.sorted_tables

Might be useful.

Answer 3

from sqlalchemy import MetaData,create_engine,Table
engine = create_engine('postgresql://postgres:********@localhost/db_name')

metadata = MetaData(bind=engine)

rivers = Table('rivers',metadata,autoload=True,auto_load_with=engine)

from sqlalchemy import select

s = select([rivers]).limit(5)
engine.execute(s).fetchall()

worked for me. I was getting the error because of not specifying bind when creating MetaData() object.

Answer 4

OK, I think I figured it out. The solution is to declare the model objects outside the model/__init__.py. I concluded that __init__.py gets imported as the first file when importing something from a module (in this case model) and this causes problems because the model objects are declared before init_model() is called.

To avoid this I created a new file in the model module, e.g. objects.py. I then declared all my model objects (like Event) in this file.

Then, I can import my models like this:

from PRJ.model.objects import Event

Furthermore, to avoid specifying autoload-with for each table, I added this line at the end of init_model():

Base.metadata.bind = engine

This way I can declare my model objects with no boilerplate code, like this:

class Event(Base):
    __tablename__ = 'events'
    __table_args__ = {'schema': 'events', 'autoload': True}

    event_identifiers = relationship(EventIdentifier)

    def __repr__(self):
        return "<Event(%s)>" % self.id