I could use some insightful suggestions here: What do you think of this use case?
Let's say I have a class Foo mapped to a table 'foos', and a many:many relation between these objects, stored in the table 'foo_relations'. columns on foos: id (Integer) data (Text) columns on foo_relations: this_foo_id (Integer) that_foo_id (Integer) But this implicitly creates a "direction" to the m:m relation, something that I don't want. I want this m:m relation to be bi- directional (or you could call it "adirectional"). The setup above makes one foo into "this" and the other into "that". It's not, of course, because of what I labeled them; it's because the columns have to be labeled at all. But I don't want a specific directionality here. Now when I want to find out whether a Foo has a relation to another Foo, I have to check whether there exists any row in foo_relations that has the given Foo as either as "this" OR "that". Also, what if I need backrefs on the foo_relations mapper? The backref from 'this' and the backref from 'that' would both point to something called a foo, but they would have to be given separate labels in order ot not be conflicting property names -- when really, I would not want to know if a foo was the 'that' or the 'this' of some foo relation. So ideally in a case like this, I could set an option that says the m:m relation is bidirectional, and that the backrefs for both foreign keys in the m:m table should really point to the same place (or at least be unioned together). I have a feeling that would violate some part of the RDBMS standards, and I'm perfectly willing to go without or work around. This is more of a philosophical point for learning's sake -- what do other people do in such cases? Thanks, Eric --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sqlalchemy" group. To post to this group, send email to sqlalchemy@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sqlalchemy?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
