Question

I have two tables beard and moustache defined below:

+--------+---------+------------+-------------+
| person | beardID | beardStyle | beardLength |
+--------+---------+------------+-------------+

+--------+-------------+----------------+
| person | moustacheID | moustacheStyle |
+--------+-------------+----------------+

I have created a SQL Query in PostgreSQL which will combine these two tables and generate following result:

+--------+---------+------------+-------------+-------------+----------------+
| person | beardID | beardStyle | beardLength | moustacheID | moustacheStyle |
+--------+---------+------------+-------------+-------------+----------------+
| bob    | 1       | rasputin   | 1           |             |                |
+--------+---------+------------+-------------+-------------+----------------+
| bob    | 2       | samson     | 12          |             |                |
+--------+---------+------------+-------------+-------------+----------------+
| bob    |         |            |             | 1           | fu manchu      |
+--------+---------+------------+-------------+-------------+----------------+

Query:

SELECT * FROM beards LEFT OUTER JOIN mustaches ON (false) WHERE  person = "bob"
UNION ALL
SELECT * FROM beards b RIGHT OUTER JOIN mustaches ON (false) WHERE  person = "bob"

However I can not create SQLAlchemy representation of it. I tried several ways from implementing from_statement to outerjoin but none of them really worked. Can anyone help me with it?

Answer 1

From @Francis P‘s suggestion I came up with this snippet:

q1 = session.\
     query(beard.person.label('person'),
           beard.beardID.label('beardID'),
           beard.beardStyle.label('beardStyle'),
           sqlalchemy.sql.null().label('moustachID'),
           sqlalchemy.sql.null().label('moustachStyle'),
     ).\
     filter(beard.person == 'bob')

q2 = session.\
     query(moustache.person.label('person'),
           sqlalchemy.sql.null().label('beardID'), 
           sqlalchemy.sql.null().label('beardStyle'),
           moustache.moustachID,
           moustache.moustachStyle,
     ).\
     filter(moustache.person == 'bob')

result = q1.union(q2).all()

However this works but you can’t call it as an answer because it appears as a hack. This is one more reason why there should be RIGHT OUTER JOIN in sqlalchemy.