simple update in sqlalchemy

Question

UserTable is:

• id (INT)

• name (STR)

• last_login (DATETIME)

Serving a web page request i have a user id in hand and I only wish to update the last_login field to 'now'.

It seems to me that there are 2 ways:

1. issue a direct SQL using db_engine (losing the mapper)

2. OR query the user first and then update the object

Both work fine but look quite disgusting in code.

Is anyone aware of a more elegant way of doing an update-with-no-query using sqlalchemy? Is there another ORM who has got this right?

Thanks

Answer 1

Assuming you have a mapper UserTable in place:

DBSession.query(UserTable).filter_by(id = user_id).\
    update({"last_login":datetime.datetime.now()}, synchronize_session=False)

Additional parameters in the docs.