db.Model, db.session and defining models

Given an instance of the SQLAlchemy class from Flask-SQLAlchemy,

db = SQLAlchemy(app)

• db is an interface for interacting with our database
• db.Model lets us create and manipulate data models. Models which are defined as classes mapped to tables within our database.
• db.session lets us create and manipulate database transactions. The context of a session which we use in order to interact with the database.

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Declaring classes

• class MyModel(db.Model) will inherit from db.Model
• By inheriting from db.Model, we map from our classes to tables via SQLAlchemy ORM

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Defining columns

• Within our class, we declare attributes equal to db.Column(…)
• db.Column takes datatype, primary_key, constraint, default

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Table naming

• By default, SQLAlchemy will pick the name of the table for you, setting it equal to the lower-case version of your class’s name. Otherwise, we set the name of the table using
  tablename = ''my_custom_table_name"

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from flask import Flask
from flask_sqlalchemy import SQLAlchemy

app = Flask(__name__)

app.config['SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI'] = 'postgresql://username@localhost:5432/example'
db = SQLAlchemy(app)

# The Person class inherit from db.Model, we wound up linking and connecting to SQLAlchemy's mappings between classes and tables.
class Person(db.Model):
    # By defult, SQLAlchemy will pick the name of the table for you and set it equal to the lowercase version of your class.
    # But if you want to control the name of the table, you can do this way
    __tablename__ = 'persons'
    id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
    name = db.Column(db.String(), nullable=False)


@app.route('/')
def index():
    return 'Hello World!'

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run()