Declaring Models

Generally Flask-SQLAlchemy behaves like a properly configured declarative base from the declarative extension. As such we recommend reading the SQLAlchemy docs for a full reference. However the most common use cases are also documented here.

Things to keep in mind:

  • The baseclass for all your models is called db.Model. It’s stored on the SQLAlchemy instance you have to create. See Quickstart for more details.

  • Some parts that are required in SQLAlchemy are optional in Flask-SQLAlchemy. For instance the table name is automatically set for you unless overridden. It’s derived from the class name converted to lowercase and with “CamelCase” converted to “camel_case”. To override the table name, set the __tablename__ class attribute.

Simple Example

A very simple example:

class User(db.Model):
    id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
    username = db.Column(db.String(80), unique=True, nullable=False)
    email = db.Column(db.String(120), unique=True, nullable=False)

    def __repr__(self):
        return '<User %r>' % self.username

Use Column to define a column. The name of the column is the name you assign it to. If you want to use a different name in the table you can provide an optional first argument which is a string with the desired column name. Primary keys are marked with primary_key=True. Multiple keys can be marked as primary keys in which case they become a compound primary key.

The types of the column are the first argument to Column. You can either provide them directly or call them to further specify them (like providing a length). The following types are the most common:

Integer

an integer

String(size)

a string with a maximum length (optional in some databases, e.g. PostgreSQL)

Text

some longer unicode text

DateTime

date and time expressed as Python datetime object.

Float

stores floating point values

Boolean

stores a boolean value

PickleType

stores a pickled Python object

LargeBinary

stores large arbitrary binary data

One-to-Many Relationships

The most common relationships are one-to-many relationships. Because relationships are declared before they are established you can use strings to refer to classes that are not created yet (for instance if Person defines a relationship to Address which is declared later in the file).

Relationships are expressed with the relationship() function. However the foreign key has to be separately declared with the ForeignKey class:

class Person(db.Model):
    id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
    name = db.Column(db.String(50), nullable=False)
    addresses = db.relationship('Address', backref='person', lazy=True)

class Address(db.Model):
    id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
    email = db.Column(db.String(120), nullable=False)
    person_id = db.Column(db.Integer, db.ForeignKey('person.id'),
        nullable=False)

What does db.relationship() do? That function returns a new property that can do multiple things. In this case we told it to point to the Address class and load multiple of those. How does it know that this will return more than one address? Because SQLAlchemy guesses a useful default from your declaration. If you would want to have a one-to-one relationship you can pass uselist=False to relationship().

Since a person with no name or an email address with no address associated makes no sense, nullable=False tells SQLAlchemy to create the column as NOT NULL. This is implied for primary key columns, but it’s a good idea to specify it for all other columns to make it clear to other people working on your code that you did actually want a nullable column and did not just forget to add it.

So what do backref and lazy mean? backref is a simple way to also declare a new property on the Address class. You can then also use my_address.person to get to the person at that address. lazy defines when SQLAlchemy will load the data from the database:

  • 'select' / True (which is the default, but explicit is better than implicit) means that SQLAlchemy will load the data as necessary in one go using a standard select statement.

  • 'joined' / False tells SQLAlchemy to load the relationship in the same query as the parent using a JOIN statement.

  • 'subquery' works like 'joined' but instead SQLAlchemy will use a subquery.

  • 'dynamic' is special and can be useful if you have many items and always want to apply additional SQL filters to them. Instead of loading the items SQLAlchemy will return another query object which you can further refine before loading the items. Note that this cannot be turned into a different loading strategy when querying so it’s often a good idea to avoid using this in favor of lazy=True. A query object equivalent to a dynamic user.addresses relationship can be created using Address.query.with_parent(user) while still being able to use lazy or eager loading on the relationship itself as necessary.

How do you define the lazy status for backrefs? By using the backref() function:

class Person(db.Model):
    id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
    name = db.Column(db.String(50), nullable=False)
    addresses = db.relationship('Address', lazy='select',
        backref=db.backref('person', lazy='joined'))

Many-to-Many Relationships

If you want to use many-to-many relationships you will need to define a helper table that is used for the relationship. For this helper table it is strongly recommended to not use a model but an actual table:

tags = db.Table('tags',
    db.Column('tag_id', db.Integer, db.ForeignKey('tag.id'), primary_key=True),
    db.Column('page_id', db.Integer, db.ForeignKey('page.id'), primary_key=True)
)

class Page(db.Model):
    id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
    tags = db.relationship('Tag', secondary=tags, lazy='subquery',
        backref=db.backref('pages', lazy=True))

class Tag(db.Model):
    id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)

Here we configured Page.tags to be loaded immediately after loading a Page, but using a separate query. This always results in two queries when retrieving a Page, but when querying for multiple pages you will not get additional queries.

The list of pages for a tag on the other hand is something that’s rarely needed. For example, you won’t need that list when retrieving the tags for a specific page. Therefore, the backref is set to be lazy-loaded so that accessing it for the first time will trigger a query to get the list of pages for that tag. If you need to apply further query options on that list, you could either switch to the 'dynamic' strategy - with the drawbacks mentioned above - or get a query object using Page.query.with_parent(some_tag) and then use it exactly as you would with the query object from a dynamic relationship.