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:'
  For a local file, 'sqlite:///data.db'
  

  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.