The right way to auto filter SQLAlchemy queries?

Question

I've just introspected a pretty nasty schema from a CRM app with sqlalchemy. All of the tables have a deleted column on them and I wanted to auto filter all those entities and relations flagged as deleted. Here's what I came up with:

---

class CustomizableQuery(Query):
    """An overridden sqlalchemy.orm.query.Query to filter entities

    Filters itself by BinaryExpressions
    found in :attr:`CONDITIONS`
    """

    CONDITIONS = []

    def __init__(self, mapper, session=None):
        super(CustomizableQuery, self).__init__(mapper, session)
        for cond in self.CONDITIONS:
            self._add_criterion(cond)

    def _add_criterion(self, criterion):
        criterion = self._adapt_clause(criterion, False, True)
        if self._criterion is not None:
            self._criterion = self._criterion & criterion
        else:
            self._criterion = criterion

And it's used like this:

class UndeletedContactQuery(CustomizableQuery):
    CONDITIONS = [contacts.c.deleted != True]

    def by_email(self, email_address):
        return EmailInfo.query.by_module_and_address('Contacts', email_address).contact

    def by_username(self, uname):
        return self.filter_by(twod_username_c=uname).one()

class Contact(object):
    query = session.query_property(UndeletedContactQuery)

Contact.query.by_email('[email protected]')

EmailInfo is the class that's mapped to the join table between emails and the other Modules that they're related to.

Here's an example of a mapper:

contacts_map = mapper(Contact, join(contacts, contacts_cstm), {
    '_emails': dynamic_loader(EmailInfo,
                              foreign_keys=[email_join.c.bean_id],
                              primaryjoin=contacts.c.id==email_join.c.bean_id,
                              query_class=EmailInfoQuery),
    })

class EmailInfoQuery(CustomizableQuery):

    CONDITIONS = [email_join.c.deleted != True]
    # More methods here

---

This gives me what I want in that I've filtered out all deleted Contacts. I can also use this as the query_class argument to dynamic_loader in my mappers - However...

1. Is there a better way to do this, I'm not really happy with poking around with the internals of a compicated class like Query as I am.
2. Has anyone solved this in a different way that they can share?

Answer 1

You can map to a select. Like this:

mapper(EmailInfo, select([email_join], email_join.c.deleted == False))