I must be in a "search blind spot", I'm having trouble finding references and examples for this pattern, though I feel certain I've seen examples around the sqlalchemy literature a couple of times before.
I have a table of Companies, and then further tables of Manufacturer and Vendor info which apply to some companies. So a company can be stored just as a company, or as a company that happens to be a manufacturer, and/or happens to be a vendor. I don't want the manufacturer and vendor designations to be exclusive of each other; it should be possible for a company to be both. I thought of just having a boolean field on the Company table for each 'child' type. So (company.manufacturer == True) would tell me it's safe to write to or read from attributes whose storage is in the manufacturer info table. Likewise, (company.vendor == True) would indicate that it's safe to write to or read from attributes whose storage is in the vendor info table. And of course some companies will be filed as neither, so I won't attempt to access mfr or vendor info about them. Regular SA joined-table inheritance doesn't work this way since it requires a discriminator column taking a single value at a time. Still I would love to use joined-table inheritance if I could. Is there a way? Should I just try to do this with single-table inheritance or even just go without SA's inheritance features and python my way to working attributes that do what I wish based on a single table? I just don't want to miss out if there's a way I could do this elegantly (and fully normalized) with joined tables. I'll admit that single tables with some columns being defunct for some rows just bug the normalization freak in me. Thanks in advance. Eric -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sqlalchemy" group. To post to this group, send email to sqlalch...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sqlalchemy+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sqlalchemy?hl=en.
