Working with Related Objects

In this chapter, we will focus on the related objects in SQLAlchemy ORM.

Now when we create a Customer object, a blank invoice collection will be present in the form of Python List.

c1 = Customer(name = "Gopal Krishna", address = "Bank Street Hydarebad", email = "gk@gmail.com")

The invoices attribute of c1.invoices will be an empty pst. We can assign items in the pst as −

c1.invoices = [Invoice(invno = 10, amount = 15000), Invoice(invno = 14, amount = 3850)]

Let us commit this object to the database using Session object as follows −

from sqlalchemy.orm import sessionmaker
Session = sessionmaker(bind = engine)
session = Session()
session.add(c1)
session.commit()

This will automatically generate INSERT queries for customers and invoices tables −

INSERT INTO customers (name, address, email) VALUES (?, ?, ?) 
( Gopal Krishna ,  Bank Street Hydarebad ,  gk@gmail.com )
INSERT INTO invoices (custid, invno, amount) VALUES (?, ?, ?)
(2, 10, 15000)
INSERT INTO invoices (custid, invno, amount) VALUES (?, ?, ?)
(2, 14, 3850)

Let us now look at contents of customers table and invoices table in the table view of SQLiteStudio −

You can construct Customer object by providing mapped attribute of invoices in the constructor itself by using the below command −

c2 = [
   Customer(
      name = "Govind Pant", 
      address = "Gulmandi Aurangabad",
      email = "gpant@gmail.com",
      invoices = [Invoice(invno = 3, amount = 10000), 
      Invoice(invno = 4, amount = 5000)]
   )
]

Or a pst of objects to be added using add_all() function of session object as shown below −

rows = [
   Customer(
      name = "Govind Kala", 
      address = "Gulmandi Aurangabad", 
      email = "kala@gmail.com", 
      invoices = [Invoice(invno = 7, amount = 12000), Invoice(invno = 8, amount = 18500)]),

   Customer(
      name = "Abdul Rahman", 
      address = "Rohtak", 
      email = "abdulr@gmail.com",
      invoices = [Invoice(invno = 9, amount = 15000), 
      Invoice(invno = 11, amount = 6000)
   ])
]

session.add_all(rows)
session.commit()