A persistent model¶
The model from the previous chapter is a bit naive.
Sure, you can create Addresses and save them to an AddressBook, but all of this is done in memory. A real world application rarely works like this. Usually at least some of the objects would need to be saved to a database to avoid losing them. This is especially true for web applications.
Persisting a model using SqlAlchemy¶
The problem of mapping Object Oriented models to relational databases is a considerable headache, but necessary if you want to work in an Object Oriented programming language like Python! Reahl does not implement persistence mechanisms by itself. That’s a tough nut to crack. Besides there are cool tools for persisting objects in Python. Reahl merely provides some glue so these tools can be used easily. SqlAlchemy deals with this persistence problem.
Let’s shift to a more real world model for an address book application that uses SqlAlchemy for persistence. If Address instances can be persisted in a database, an AddressBook is not needed anymore. An AddressBook was merely the thing that held on to our Addresses and the database does the job just as well, if not better.
That leaves a model consisting of a single class:
from sqlalchemy import Column, Integer, UnicodeText
from reahl.sqlalchemysupport import Session, Base, metadata
class Address(Base):
__tablename__ = 'modeltests2_address'
id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
email_address = Column(UnicodeText)
name = Column(UnicodeText)
def save(self):
Session.add(self)
This shows mostly SqlAlchemy stuff, with a little Reahl help. Notice that Session, Base and metadata are imported from a Reahl package. These are provided for working with SqlAlchemy in a Reahl program.
A discussion of SqlAlchemy is outside the scope of this tutorial, but here are some pointers to readers unfamiliar with SqlAlchemy:
In order to map Address to a relational database table, we use SqlALchemy’s Declarative extension:
- __tablename__ states which relational table Address instances go into;
- The assignment of Column instances to email_address and name states that those attributes of Address are to be inserted in similarly named columns on the relational database;
- The underlying database table columns will have types as indicated when constructing each Column object;
- The id Column provides a unique identifier for each Address instance (and is also its primary key in the database); and
- To actually persist an Address instance to the database, Session.add() is called.
If you are not familiar with SqlAlchemy, please refer to its documentation: no short introduction can ever do it justice.
Exercising a persistent model¶
Exercising such database code involves a cinch: Reahl manages a few things related to the database behind the scenes. For example, it takes care of creating and committing database transactions at the appropriate times.
Usually this is done behind the scenes, out of the view (and concern)
of the programmer. In a test, though, a lot of the Reahl framework is
bypassed, so you have to do its job explicitly. Luckily that is
easy – database code just needs to be executed within an
ExecutionContext. This can be done as shown in the complete example
below:
from __future__ import print_function, unicode_literals, absolute_import, division
from nose.tools import istest
from sqlalchemy import Column, Integer, UnicodeText
from reahl.sqlalchemysupport import Session, Base, metadata
from reahl.component.context import ExecutionContext
class Address(Base):
__tablename__ = 'modeltests2_address'
id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
email_address = Column(UnicodeText)
name = Column(UnicodeText)
def save(self):
Session.add(self)
@istest
def test_model():
metadata.bind = 'sqlite:///:memory:'
metadata.create_all()
with ExecutionContext():
Address(name='John', email_address='[email protected]').save()
Address(name='Jane', email_address='[email protected]').save()
addresses = Session.query(Address).all()
assert addresses[0].name == 'John'
assert addresses[0].email_address == '[email protected]'
assert addresses[1].name == 'Jane'
assert addresses[1].email_address == '[email protected]'
Note
Have you noticed how the first few lines of the test_model() connects to the database, ensuring that its schema is created for the test run? That is all standard SqlAlchemy without any Reahl influence.
In a complete Reahl program, none of this database housekeeping is visible in code – Reahl provides tools that deal with it.