Items

• Items is a wrapper for parts of the SQLAlchemy library, originally written for Juno (http://github.com/breily/juno/).

• Specifically, it wraps the database setup and class/table creation portions.

• Homepage: http://brianreily.com/project/items

Example Usage

import items
it = items.Items() # Creates 'sqlite:///:memory:'

Person = it.model('Person', name='str')
brian = Person(name='brian')
brian.save()

p = it.find(Person).first()
=> <Person: 1>
p.name
=> u'brian'

Details

• First, create an Items object. This takes the optional argument:

  engine_name => By default, 'sqlite:///:memory:'
  

See http://sqlalchemy.org/docs/05/dbengine.html for details on what makes up an engine name.

• Use your items object to create classes, with model(). model() takes three types of arguments:

  model_name   => The name of your new class (technically it does not have
                  to be the same name, but this makes the most sense).
  column types => Any variables you want your class to have.  In the 
                  above example, 'name' is a variable and 'str' is the 
                  column type.  See <items.column_mapping> for options.
  callables    => Any functions you want your class to have.
  

• Models come built with an init function and a repr function. Any others you want you have to give to the constructor:

  Person = it.model('Person', i='int', double=lambda self, x: x * 2)
  p = Person(i=4)
  p.double(17)
  => 34
  

• Models also come with a find() function and a save() function:

  Person.find() => Returns a SQLAlchemy Query object.  Acts the same as
                   it.find(Person).
  p.save()      => Used on an instance of your model, it is shorthand
                   for `it.add(p); it.commit();`.
  

• To access the database, your Items object includes a number of methods:

  it.find(Person)  => Returns a SQLAlchemy query object.
  it.add(instance) => Add an instance (or multiple instances) to the current 
                      session.
  it.commit()      => Commit any pending changes.
  

• You can also use the session object to do these things directly:

  it.session       => Return a SQLAlchemy session object.