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/ To post example code, please provide an MCVE: Minimal, Complete, and Verifiable Example. See http://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve for a full description. --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sqlalchemy" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sqlalchemy+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sqlalchemy@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sqlalchemy. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sqlalchemy/fe10fd2d-c792-4257-b453-696262232df1%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.