Question

Using

• Flask
• Flask-sqlalchemy
• Sqlalchemy
• Jquery
• Datatables (jquery plugin)
• Jeditable (jquery plugin)

---

Consider this user class ( straight out of flask-sqlalchemy docs):

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

    def __init__(self, username, email):
        self.username = username
        self.email = email

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

The datatables makes an ajax request and populates the table. Each td then is made editable in place with jeditable. As soon as a td is modified, jeditable makes a POST request to localhost/modify containing:

• The row id(the same id from the user class)
• The new modified value
• The column of the table that was altered ( for the sake of argument let’s assume that there are three columns id/username/email) (int)

Now, i’d like that in the function that handles localhost/modify i take the row id, make a user object and query the db for that specific row, see what property needs to be modified, modify it with the new value and commit to the db. Here’s what i got so far:

@app.route('/modify', methods=['GET', 'POST'])
def modify()
    if request.method == 'POST' :
        user = user.query.get(form.row_id)
        if form.column_id == int(0):
            user.id = form.value
        elif form.column_id == int(1):
            user.username = form.value
        elif form.column_id == int(2):
            user.email = form.value
        else:
            pass
        db.session.commit()
    return 'ok'

This way, yes it does work but theremust be amore beautiful approach. This one doesn’t seem very…pythonic

Mihai

Answer 1

Use a map of column ID to attribute name.

colmap = {
    0: 'id',
    1: 'username',
    2: 'email',
}

@app.route('/modify', methods=['GET', 'POST'])
def modify()
    if request.method == 'POST' :
        user = user.query.get(form.row_id)
        try:
            setattr(user, colmap[form.column_id], form.value)
        except KeyError:
            pass
        db.session.commit()
    return 'ok'