Creating modelsΒΆ

Camelot makes it easy to create views for any type of Python objects.

SQLAlchemy is a very powerful Object Relational Mapper (ORM) with lots of possibilities for handling simple or sophisticated datastructures. The SQLAlchemy website has extensive documentation on all these features. An important part of Camelot is providing an easy way to create views for objects mapped through SQLAlchemy.

SQLAlchemy comes with the Declarative extension to make it easy to define an ORM mapping using the Active Record Pattern. This is used through the documentation and in the example code.

To use Declarative, threre are some base classes that should be imported:

from camelot.core.orm import Entity
from camelot.admin.entity_admin import EntityAdmin

from sqlalchemy import sql
from sqlalchemy.schema import Column
import sqlalchemy.types

Those are :

Next a model can be defined:

class Tag(Entity):

    __tablename__ = 'tags'

    name = Column( sqlalchemy.types.Unicode(60), nullable = False )
    movies = ManyToMany( 'Movie',
                         tablename = 'tags_movies__movies_tags',
                         local_colname = 'movies_id',
                         remote_colname = 'tags_id' )

    def __unicode__( self ):
        return self.name

    class Admin( EntityAdmin ):
        form_size = (400,200)
        list_display = ['name']

# begin visitor report definition

The code above defines the model for a Tag class, an object with only a name that can be related to other ojbects later on. This code has some things to notice :

  • Tag is a subclass of camelot.core.orm.Entity,
  • the __tablename__ class attribute allows us to specify the name of the table in the database in which the tags will be stored.
  • The sqlalchemy.schema.Column statement add fields of a certain type, in this case sqlalchemy.types.Unicode, to the Tag class as well as to the tags table
  • The __unicode__ method is implemented, this method will be called within Camelot whenever a textual representation of the object is needed, eg in a window title or a many to one widget. It’s good practice to always implement the __unicode__ method for all Entity subclasses.

When a new Camelot project is created, the camelot-admin tool creates an empty models.py file that can be used as a place to start the model definition.

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