Reflection¶
When working for a big project, sometimes new, sometimes legacy, you might face cases where there is already an existing database with tables and views and you simply would like to reflect them into your code by representation without the need of creating new ones.
This is where Edgy reflection comes in.
What is reflection¶
Reflection means the opposite of creating the models, meaning, reading tables and views from an existing back into your code.
Let us see an example.
Imagine you have the following table generated into the database.
import edgy
from edgy import Database, Registry
database = Database("sqlite:///db.sqlite")
models = Registry(database=database)
class User(edgy.Model):
age: int = edgy.IntegerField(minimum=18)
is_active: bool = edgy.BooleanField(default=True)
class Meta:
registry = models
This will create a table called users
in the database as expected.
Note
We use the previous example to generate a table for explanation purposes. If you already have tables in a given db, you don't need this.
Now you want to reflect the existing table users
from the database into your models (code).
import edgy
from edgy import Database, Registry
database = Database("sqlite:///db.sqlite")
models = Registry(database=database)
class User(edgy.ReflectModel):
age: int = edgy.IntegerField(minimum=18)
is_active: bool = edgy.BooleanField(default=True)
class Meta:
tablename = "users"
registry = models
What is happening is:
- The
ReflectModel
is going to the database. - Reads the existing tables.
- Verifies if there is any
users
table name. - Converts the
users
fields into Edgy model fields.
Note¶
ReflectModel works with database tables AND database views. That is right, you can use the model reflect to reflect existing database tables and database views from any existing database.
ReflectModel¶
The reflect model is very similar to Model
from models but with a main difference
that won't generate any migrations.
from edgy import ReflectModel
The same operations of inserting, deleting, updating and creating are still valid and working as per normal behaviour.
Parameters
As per normal model, it is required the Meta
class with two parameters.
-
registry - The registry instance for where the model will be generated. This field is mandatory and it will raise an
ImproperlyConfigured
error if no registry is found. -
tablename - The name of the table or view to be reflected from the database, not the class name.
Default:
name of class pluralised
Example:
import edgy
from edgy import Database, Registry
database = Database("sqlite:///db.sqlite")
models = Registry(database=database)
class User(edgy.ReflectModel):
age: int = edgy.IntegerField(minimum=18)
is_active: bool = edgy.BooleanField(default=True)
class Meta:
tablename = "users"
registry = models
Fields¶
The fields should be declared as per normal fields that represents the columns from the reflected database table or view.
Example:
import edgy
from edgy import Database, Registry
database = Database("sqlite:///db.sqlite")
models = Registry(database=database)
class User(edgy.ReflectModel):
age: int = edgy.IntegerField(minimum=18)
is_active: bool = edgy.BooleanField(default=True)
class Meta:
tablename = "users"
registry = models
The difference from the models¶
When reflecting a model or a view from an existing database, usually you want to reflect the existing fields from it but sometimes in your code, you simply want only a few fields reflected and not all of them for your own reasons.
Edgy ReflectModel
does this for you.
Let us see an example:
Consider this table as already been created in a database somewhere with the following structure.
import edgy
from edgy import Database, Registry
database = Database("sqlite:///db.sqlite")
models = Registry(database=database)
class User(edgy.Model):
age: int = edgy.IntegerField(minimum=18, null=True)
is_active: bool = edgy.BooleanField(default=True, null=True)
description: str = edgy.CharField(max_length=255, null=True)
profile_type: str = edgy.CharField(max_length=255, null=True)
username: str = edgy.CharField(max_length=255, null=True)
class Meta:
registry = models
Check
For this example, we use a pythonic representation of a table in a database instead of a SQL as it looks easier to understand what is what in this context.
Now imagine somewhere in another application you want to reflect the existing users
table
(above) but you only want a few fields and not all of them.
Your reflect model would look like this:
import edgy
from edgy import Database, Registry
database = Database("sqlite:///db.sqlite")
models = Registry(database=database)
class Profile(edgy.ReflectModel):
is_active: bool = edgy.BooleanField(default=True, null=True)
profile_type: str = edgy.CharField(max_length=255, null=True)
username: str = edgy.CharField(max_length=255, null=True)
class Meta:
tablename = "users"
registry = models
Meaning, although you migh have legacy tables you still want to use you might also want to use
only a few necessary fields for your operations and this is what ReflectModel
allows you to
achieve.
Operations¶
What about the database operations like the CRUD? Are they still possible with ReflectModel
?
The answer is yes.
With ReflectModel
you can still perform the normal operations as you would do with
models anyway.
Remember the difference from the models? Well here is another
thing. The ReflectModel
will only perform operations on the declared fields of the
same ReflectModel
.
In other words, if you want to update a field that is the table being reflected but not in
the ReflectModel
declaration, the operation on that field will not happen.
Warning
If you are reflecting SQL views, you probably will not be able to write (create, update...) as the SQL view has that same limitation.