Question

I am developing an extension to an existing app which uses sqlalchemy 0.6.

The app has sqlalchemy tables created the non-declarative way. I am trying to create in my extension a new table with a foreign key column pointing at the primary key of the main table in the application database and I am creating it declaratively.

This all works fine, with the table created once the extension is loaded, and with no complaints at all. My table prints out and demonstrates that new rows have been added ok.
What I want and think is possible (but don’t know as I have never used sql or any other database) is for the corresponding row in my table to be deleted when the row in the app’s main table with the corresponding foreign key is deleted.

So far, and with many permutations having been tried, nothing has worked. I thought that with a backref set and with a relation defined with delete being cascaded, there shouldn’t be a problem. Because the new table is defined in an extension which should just plugin, I don’t want to edit the code in the main app at all, at least that is my goal. One of the problems that I have, though, is that the main app table that I want to reference, has no member variables defined in its class, does not declare its primary key in its mapper and only has the primary key declared in the table. This makes it difficult to create a relation(ship) clause, the first argument of which must be to a class or mapper (in this case neither of which have the primary key declared).
Is there any way of achieving this?

ps – here is some of the code that I am using. LocalFile is the declarative class. All the connection details are taken care of by the main application.

    if not self.LocalFile.__table__.exists(bind=Engine):
        self.LocalFile__table__.create(bind=Engine)

Here is the LocalFile class – Base is a declarative base class with bind=Engine passed in the constructor:

   class LocalFile(Base):
    __tablename__ = 'local_file'
    _id = Column(Integer, Sequence('local_file_sequence', start=1, increment=1), primary_key=True)
    _filename = Column(String(50), nullable=False)
    _filepath = Column(String(128), nullable=False)
    _movieid = Column(Integer, ForeignKey(db.tables.movies.c.movie_id, onupdate='CASCADE', ondelete='CASCADE'))
    #movies = relation(db.Movie, backref="local_file", cascade="all")

    @property
    def filename(self):
        return self._filename

    @filename.setter
    def filename(self, filename):
        self._filename = filename

    @property
    def filepath(self):
        return self._filepath

    @filepath.setter
    def filepath(self, filepath):
        self._filepath = filepath

    @property
    def movieid(self):
        return self._movieid

    @movieid.setter
    def movieid(self, movieid):
        self._movieid = movieid

    @property
    def id(self):
        return self._id

    @id.setter
    def id(self, id):
        self._id = id

    filename = synonym('_filename', descriptor=filename)
    movieid = synonym('_movieid', descriptor=movieid)
    filepath = synonym('_filepath', descriptor=filepath)
    id = synonym('_id', descriptor=id)

    def __init__(self, filename, filepath, movieid):
        self._filename = filename
        self._filepath = filepath
        self._movieid = movieid

    def __repr__(self):
        return "<User('%s','%s', '%s')>" % (self.filename, self.filepath, self.movieid)

Edit:

The backend is sqlite3. Below is the code from the creation of the table produced by using the echo command (thanks for pointing that out, it’s very useful – already I suspect that the existing application is generating far more sql than is necessary).
Following the reported sql table creation is the code generated when a row is removed. I personally can’t see any statement that references the possible deletion of a row in the local file table, but I know very little sql currently. Thanks.

     2011-12-29 16:29:18,530 INFO sqlalchemy.engine.base.Engine.0x...0650 
     CREATE TABLE local_file (
_id INTEGER NOT NULL, 
_filename VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL, 
_filepath VARCHAR(128) NOT NULL, 
_movieid INTEGER, 
PRIMARY KEY (_id), 
FOREIGN KEY(_movieid) REFERENCES movies (movie_id) ON DELETE CASCADE ON UPDATE CASCADE

)

    2011-12-29T16:29:18: I: sqlalchemy.engine.base.Engine.0x...0650(base:1387): 
    CREATE TABLE local_file (
_id INTEGER NOT NULL, 
_filename VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL, 
_filepath VARCHAR(128) NOT NULL, 
_movieid INTEGER, 
PRIMARY KEY (_id), 
FOREIGN KEY(_movieid) REFERENCES movies (movie_id) ON DELETE CASCADE ON UPDATE CASCADE

)

2011-12-29 16:29:18,534 INFO sqlalchemy.engine.base.Engine.0x...0650 ()
2011-12-29T16:29:18: I: sqlalchemy.engine.base.Engine.0x...0650(base:1388): ()
2011-12-29 16:29:18,643 INFO sqlalchemy.engine.base.Engine.0x...0650 COMMIT
2011-12-29T16:29:18: I: sqlalchemy.engine.base.Engine.0x...0650(base:1095): COMMIT

for row in table produces the following for the two tables:

the local file table:
(, u’ 310 To Yuma’)
(, u’ Ravenous’)

the movie table in the existing app:
(, u’IMDb – 3:10 to Yuma’)
(, u’Ravenous’)

The code when deleting a row is so long that I cannot include it here (200 lines or so – isn’t that a little too many for deleting one row?), but it makes no reference to deleting a row in the localfile table. There are statements like:

   2011-12-29 17:09:17,141 INFO sqlalchemy.engine.base.Engine.0x...0650 UPDATE movies SET   poster_md5=?, updated=? WHERE movies.movie_id = ?
   2011-12-29T17:09:17: I: sqlalchemy.engine.base.Engine.0x...0650(base:1387): UPDATE movies SET poster_md5=?, updated=? WHERE movies.movie_id = ?
   2011-12-29 17:09:17,142 INFO sqlalchemy.engine.base.Engine.0x...0650 (None, '2011-12-29 17:09:17.141019', 2)
   2011-12-29T17:09:17: I: sqlalchemy.engine.base.Engine.0x...0650(base:1388): (None, '2011-12-29 17:09:17.141019', 2)
   2011-12-29 17:09:17,150 INFO sqlalchemy.engine.base.Engine.0x...0650 DELETE FROM posters WHERE posters.md5sum = ?
   2011-12-29T17:09:17: I: sqlalchemy.engine.base.Engine.0x...0650(base:1387): DELETE FROM posters WHERE posters.md5sum = ?
   2011-12-29 17:09:17,157 INFO sqlalchemy.engine.base.Engine.0x...0650 (u'083841e14b8bb9ea166ea4b2b976f03d',)

Answer 1

In SQLite you must turn on support for foreign keys explicitly or it just ignores any SQL related to foreign keys.

engine = create_engine(database_url)

def on_connect(conn, record):
    conn.execute('pragma foreign_keys=ON')

from sqlalchemy import event
event.listen(engine, 'connect', on_connect)