SQLAlchemy Many-to-Many Relationship on a Single Table

Question

I have a SQLAlchemy model set up in my application that should mimic the functionality of "followers" on Twitter, ie. users have have a many-to-many relationship with eachother (both followers and following). The tables are structured as follows (sa is the sqlalchemy module):

t_users = sa.Table("users", meta.metadata,
    sa.Column("id", sa.types.Integer, primary_key=True),
    sa.Column("email", sa.types.String(320), unique=True, nullable=False),
    ...etc...
    )

t_follows = sa.Table("follows", meta.metadata,
    sa.Column("id", sa.types.Integer, primary_key=True),
    sa.Column("follower_id", sa.types.Integer, sa.ForeignKey('users.id'), nullable=False),
    sa.Column("followee_id", sa.types.Integer, sa.ForeignKey('users.id'), nullable=False)
    )

I've run into a bit of a roadblock however, trying to use orm.mapper to create this relationship, since the secondary table refers back to the same primary table in both directions. How would I go about mapping this relationship to the ORM?

Answer 1

You can also do this declaratively.

Here is a similar example based on teh above code, I do use the backref.

VolumeRelationship = Table(
    'VolumeRelationship', Base.metadata,
    Column('ParentID', Integer, ForeignKey('Volumes.ID')),
    Column('VolumeID', Integer, ForeignKey('Volumes.ID'))
    )

class Volume(Base):
    """ Volume Object """
    __tablename__ = "Volumes"

    id = Column('ID', Integer, primary_key=True, nullable=False)
    type = Column('Type', String(25))
    name = Column('Name', String(25))
    poolid = Column('pool', Integer, ForeignKey('Pools.ID'))
    parents = relation(
                    'Volume',secondary=VolumeRelationship,
                    primaryjoin=VolumeRelationship.c.VolumeID==id,
                    secondaryjoin=VolumeRelationship.c.ParentID==id,
                    backref="children")