Discovering referers to SQLAlchemy object

Question

I have a lot of model classes with ralations between them with a CRUD interface to edit. The problem is that some objects can't be deleted since there are other objects refering to them. Sometimes I can setup ON DELETE rule to handle this case, but in most cases I don't want automatic deletion of related objects till they are unbound manually. Anyway, I'd like to present editor a list of objects refering to currently viewed one and highlight those that prevent its deletion due to FOREIGN KEY constraint. Is there a ready solution to automatically discover referers?

Update

The task seems to be quite common (e.g. django ORM shows all dependencies), so I wonder that there is no solution to it yet.

There are two directions suggested:

1. Enumerate all relations of current object and go through their backref. But there is no guarantee that all relations have backref defined. Moreover, there are some cases when backref is meaningless. Although I can define it everywhere I don't like doing this way and it's not reliable.
2. (Suggested by van and stephan) Check all tables of MetaData object and collect dependencies from their foreign_keys property (the code of sqlalchemy_schemadisplay can be used as example, thanks to stephan's comments). This will allow to catch all dependencies between tables, but what I need is dependencies between model classes. Some foreign keys are defined in intermediate tables and have no models corresponding to them (used as secondary in relations). Sure, I can go farther and find related model (have to find a way to do it yet), but it looks too complicated.

Solution

Below is a method of base model class (designed for declarative extention) that I use as solution. It is not perfect and doesn't meet all my requirements, but it works for current state of my project. The result is collected as dictionary of dictionaries, so I can show them groupped by objects and their properties. I havn't decided yet whether it's good idea, since the list of referers sometimes is huge and I'm forced to limit it to some reasonable number.

def _get_referers(self):
    db = object_session(self)
    cls, ident = identity_key(instance=self)
    medatada = cls.__table__.metadata
    result = {}
    # _mapped_models is my extension. It is collected by metaclass, so I didn't
    # look for other ways to find all model classes.
    for other_class in medatada._mapped_models:
        queries = {}
        for prop in class_mapper(other_class).iterate_properties:
            if not (isinstance(prop, PropertyLoader) and \
                    issubclass(cls, prop.mapper.class_)):
                continue
            query = db.query(prop.parent)
            comp = prop.comparator
            if prop.uselist:
                query = query.filter(comp.contains(self))
            else:
                query = query.filter(comp==self)
            count = query.count()
            if count:
                queries[prop] = (count, query)
        if queries:
            result[other_class] = queries
    return result

Thanks to all who helped me, especially stephan and van.

Answer 1

SQL: I have to absolutely disagree with S.Lott' answer. I am not aware of out-of-the-box solution, but it is definitely possible to discover all the tables that have ForeignKey constraints to a given table. One needs to use properly the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views such as REFERENTIAL_CONSTRAINTS, KEY_COLUMN_USAGE, TABLE_CONSTRAINTS, etc. See SQL Server example. With some limitations and extensions, most versions of new relational databases support INFORMATION_SCHEMA standard. When you have all the FK information and the object (row) in the table, it is a matter of running few SELECT statements to get all other rows in other tables that refer to given row and prevent it from being deleted.

SqlAlchemy: As noted by stephan in his comment, if you use orm with backref for relations, then it should be quite easy for you to get the list of parent objects that keep reference to the object you are trying to delete, because those objects are basically mapped properties of your object (child1.Parent).

If you work with Table objects of sql alchemy (or not always use backref for relations), then you would have to get values of foreign_keys for all the tables, and then for all those ForeignKeys call references(...) method, providing your table as a parameter. In this way you will find all the FKs (and tables) that have reference to the table your object maps to. Then you can query all the objects that keep reference to your object by constructing the query for each of those FKs.

Answer 2

In general, there's no way to "discover" all of the references in a relational database.

In some databases, they may use declarative referential integrity in the form of explicit Foreign Key or Check constraints.

But there's no requirement to do this. It can be incomplete or inconsistent.

Any query can include a FK relationship that is not declared. Without the universe of all queries, you can't know the relationships which are used but not declared.

To find "referers" in general, you must actually know the database design and have all queries.