I am trying to use SQLAlchemy to do some smart joins for me without me 
having to explicitly figure out the joins during queries.
(i.e. by figuring out the relationships on its own to figure out how the 
tables are related to each other)

I have an example where i have BookSeries -> Book -> Boot2AuthorTable -> 
Author
to link a series to the authors who wrote the series.

If I do something like:
>>> print(Query(BookSeries).join(Author))
It throws an error:
InvalidRequestError: Don't know how to join to <class '__main__.Author'>;
                     please use an ON clause to more clearly establish the 
left side of this join

Doing an explicit join one-by-one
>>> print(Query(BookSeries).join(Book).join(Book2Author).join(Author))
SELECT ...
FROM bookseries
  JOIN book ON bookseries.series_id = book.series_id
  JOIN auth2book ON book.book_id = auth2book.book_id
  JOIN author ON author.author_id = auth2book.author_id

Seems to do what I expected it to do.

I'm trying to figure out if there any way for me to not have to give it all 
the tables in between and it auto-magically figured it out for me ?
Note: I understand that not all examples are as simple as this one. And 
there are nuances about when to do join/leftjoin/etc. and also about 
multiple possible paths existing between the tables.
    Assuming those are not an issue for now.

Also, the reason I do not want to mention the intermediate tables myself, 
is because the schema of all the tables are not managed by me - as it is 
read from an external database.

Either sqlalchemy itself, extensions, or third party libraries, or any 
pointers on logic to how I can solve something like this would be 
appreciated !



import sqlalchemy as sa
from sqlalchemy.ext.declarative import declarative_base
from sqlalchemy.orm.query import Query
from sqlalchemy.orm import relationship

Base = declarative_base()

class BookSeries(Base):
    __tablename__ = "bookseries"
    pk_id = sa.Column(sa.String, primary_key=True)
    series_id = sa.Column(sa.String)
    series_name = sa.Column(sa.String)
    books = relationship('Book', back_populates='book_series')



class Book(Base):
    __tablename__ = "book"
    pk_id = sa.Column(sa.String, primary_key=True)
    book_id = sa.Column(sa.String)
    series_id = sa.Column(sa.String, sa.ForeignKey('bookseries.series_id'))
    book_name = sa.Column(sa.String)
    book_series = relationship('BookSeries', back_populates='books')
    book_authors = relationship('Book2Author', back_populates='book')


class Book2Author(Base):
    __tablename__ = "auth2book"
    pk_id = sa.Column(sa.String, primary_key=True)
    author_id = sa.Column(sa.String, sa.ForeignKey('author.author_id'))
    book_id = sa.Column(sa.String, sa.ForeignKey('book.book_id'))
    author = relationship('Author')
    book = relationship('Book', back_populates='book_authors')


class Author(Base):
    __tablename__ = "author"
    pk_id = sa.Column(sa.String, primary_key=True)
    author_id = sa.Column(sa.String)
    author_name = sa.Column(sa.String)

-- 
SQLAlchemy - 
The Python SQL Toolkit and Object Relational Mapper

http://www.sqlalchemy.org/

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