How to add a custom function/method in sqlalchemy model to do CRUD operations?

Question

Below I have a Flask-SQLAlchemy model for the table User.

class User(db.Model):
    __tablename__ = 'user'

    user_id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
    name = db.Column(db.String(30), nullable=False)
    created_at = db.Column(db.DateTime, nullable=False, server_default=db.text("CURRENT_TIMESTAMP"))
    updated_at = db.Column(db.DateTime, nullable=False, server_default=db.text("CURRENT_TIMESTAMP"))

    def __init__(self):
        #self.name = name
        self.name = None

    def add_user(self, name):
        self.name = name

Here add_user is a custom method. So if I call the add_user method it should add the name to the User table.

Likewise how do I write custom methods for CRUD operations in that model itself?

Answer 1

You'll probably want to use a classmethod to accomplish this.

class User(db.Model):
    __tablename__ = 'user'

    user_id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
    name = db.Column(db.String(30), nullable=False)
    created_at = db.Column(db.DateTime, nullable=False, server_default=db.text("CURRENT_TIMESTAMP"))
    updated_at = db.Column(db.DateTime, nullable=False, server_default=db.text("CURRENT_TIMESTAMP"))

    def __init__(self, name):
        self.name = name

    @classmethod
    def create(cls, **kw):
        obj = cls(**kw)
        db.session.add(obj)
        db.session.commit()

This way you can use User.create(name="kumaran") to create a new user that will be committed to the database.

Better yet, it is a great idea to create a mixin for this method and others like it so that the functionality can be easily reused in your other models:

class BaseMixin(object):
    @classmethod
    def create(cls, **kw):
        obj = cls(**kw)
        db.session.add(obj)
        db.session.commit()

You can then reuse this functionality in your models by using multiple inheritance, like so:

class User(BaseMixin, db.Model):
    __tablename__ = 'user'

    user_id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
    name = db.Column(db.String(30), nullable=False)
    created_at = db.Column(db.DateTime, nullable=False, server_default=db.text("CURRENT_TIMESTAMP"))
    updated_at = db.Column(db.DateTime, nullable=False, server_default=db.text("CURRENT_TIMESTAMP"))

    def __init__(self, name):
        self.name = name

Answer 2

Not sure this is relevant to Flask-SQLAlchemy, but basic SQLAlchemy has examples of creating Mixin classes or augmenting the Base class.

https://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/13/orm/extensions/declarative/mixins.html

e.g.

from sqlalchemy.ext.declarative import declared_attr

class MyMixin(object):

    @declared_attr
    def __tablename__(cls):
        return cls.__name__.lower()

    __table_args__ = {'mysql_engine': 'InnoDB'}
    __mapper_args__= {'always_refresh': True}

    id =  Column(Integer, primary_key=True)

class MyModel(MyMixin, Base):
    name = Column(String(1000))