On Tue, Sep 21, 2021, at 10:41 AM, Nikola Radovanovic wrote:
> Thank you.
> 
> Maybe I did not explain well (English is not my first language): when I 
> declare a dataclass to serve as business model (so something passed around 
> the code, between libraries, layers, frameworks, etc.) -  I don't want any 
> ORM stuff in it. No matter if it is hidden in private/protected attribute. I 
> just want ORM to be able to fill my dataclass after I fetch something from 
> the DB without leaving a "trace" in resulting object and to "understand" 
> dataclass when I perform insert/update (think of it as C structure). Its not 
> a problem if I have to write this "adapter" for the needs of my project, just 
> want to know if someone already did it and if not, what would be the 
> recommended way. 

yeah i just dont see how there is any practical concern to that.   i know it 
"feels" ugly, but thats what ORMs do (all of them).  the ORM is explcitly a 
tool to instrument business objects with persistence logic.


> 
> Book I am referring explains exact problems we had when initial project 
> layout was set: we dragged ORM in our business model and made business model 
> aware of the ORM instead the opposite. Seems there are quite other 
> people/teams made the very same mistake (otherwise there will be no book 
> about it). It is not related only to SqlAlchemy but rather how people 
> (mis)use ORMs in general and made their code hard to maintain (as we did 
> because we don't know better atm).

yes this is a common thing among architectural communities.    The simple 
answer is that these model objects would have to have nothing to do with the 
SQLAlchemy ORM period if you want your business model to have absolutely zero 
linkage to the persistence details.   The _sa_class_state and 
_sa_instance_state is the least of your problems, SQLAlchemy ORM applies 
instrumented descriptors to your classes as well.  that's the whole way that 
things like MyModel.column has SQL behavior, how "my_model.column" has data in 
it, how "my_model.list_of_related" has related objects, etc.  your business 
methods on those classes then build off of those attributes, which means those 
objects are fully dependent on the ORM.

the standard way to architect for this pattern is to treat SQLAlchemy ORM 
objects as specific to persistence, then have an entirely different copy of the 
whole model as actual business objects.  Then you have a data persistence layer 
that runs queries in terms of ORM objects and can translate them to your data 
objects.  This is the pattern I would recommend; by trying to use special 
instrumentation tricks, you're trying to temporarily apply ORM instrumentation 
to objects that you otherwise would prefer have nothing to do with the 
persistence, and that's just wrong; these objects will have *everything* to do 
with persistence while this process goes on.

the above pattern is the one that is used by most of the Openstack projects, 
for example, though they have steadily moved away from it due to it being 
cumbersome.    The pydantic project offers a standard recipe for this kind of 
thing which you can see at 
https://pydantic-docs.helpmanual.io/usage/models/#orm-mode-aka-arbitrary-class-instances
 , where you have your dataclasses on one side and your persistence /ORM 
objects on the other.   people are usually pretty annoyed by this pattern so 
the SQLModel project https://github.com/tiangolo/sqlmodel aims to simplify this 
by re-joining the two types of objects together, but in this case if you are 
going for "purity" I dont think you can get around that you will need to have 
two parallel object models and a data access layer in between.    


> 
> I think SA is great ORM, I use it, recommend it to others and will continue 
> to do so - please don't take this as any sort of critique or nitpicking, I am 
> just looking some clues how to resolve problems we encounter.

not at all! I know exactly what you're going for, and that's great.   you will 
need to have two separate layers though, trying to sneak by with temporary 
instrumentation is not the way to do that.

> 
> Kindest regards
> 
> On Tuesday, September 21, 2021 at 3:51:36 PM UTC+2 Mike Bayer wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> On Mon, Sep 20, 2021, at 11:40 PM, Nikola Radovanovic wrote:
>>> Thank you,
>>> I am reading Architecture Patterns with Python 
>>> <https://www.cosmicpython.com/book/chapter_02_repository.html> and trying 
>>> to find a way to refactor our code to become maintainable.  However I 
>>> noticed that even with mapped dataclass there are problems like the one 
>>> mentioned here <https://github.com/cosmicpython/code/issues/17> and 
>>> proposed solution is to use *InstrumentationManager* you just mentioned, 
>>> but even with this approach resulting dataclass will be "linked" to ORM 
>>> object via internal attributes, defeating the purpose of Registry pattern 
>>> proposed in the book. 
>> 
>> the instrumentation manager lets you change how this "link" occurs and there 
>> doesnt need to be any attributes on the class.
>> 
>> that said, I am not familiar with that book and if there is some aspect to 
>> dataclasses that causes them to fail if there is some instrumentation on 
>> them, that's a pretty serious shortcoming in dataclasses.  
>> 
>>> 
>>> Would it be OK to simply use dict objects as adapter between dataclass and 
>>> ORM?
>> 
>> I proposed using a weakkeydictionary, so if that's what you mean, then yes.  
>>  again i am not famliiar with that book and im not really sure how code is 
>> not "maintainable" if it has some private attributes on it.  seems pretty 
>> off.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Kindest regards
>>> 
>>> On Monday, September 20, 2021 at 4:04:05 PM UTC+2 Mike Bayer wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> On Mon, Sep 20, 2021, at 5:04 AM, Nikola Radovanovic wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>> When decoupling business from ORM model, dataclass passed to SA's 
>>>>> imperative mapper *map_imperatively* will receive SA's internals like for 
>>>>> example *_sa_instance_state* and *_sa_class_manager*.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I am wondering, what would be the best way to have "pure" dataclass, 
>>>>> without SA internals? First thing to come to my mind is to perform query 
>>>>> on SA *Table* and use dict/namedtuple to populate dataclass. Are there 
>>>>> better approaches? I am in particular interested how this approach will 
>>>>> behave with partial and composite updates? Any recipe to recommend?
>>>> 
>>>> to accomplish that you use a registry, typically a weak-keyed one, where 
>>>> keys are the classes / instances in use and the values are the class 
>>>> managers and states.   If you wanted to apply such a system to your 
>>>> classes you would make use of the instrumentation extension system: 
>>>> 
>>>> https://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/14/orm/extensions/instrumentation.html
>>>> 
>>>> there's also an example of it :
>>>> 
>>>> https://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/14/_modules/examples/custom_attributes/custom_management.html
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> now as far as if you *should* do this.  Absolutely not.  The 
>>>> instrumentation extension system is a very old and almost never used 
>>>> corner of the API which I moved out of the main library some years ago due 
>>>> to its complexity.   adding a weakref lookup to all class/state 
>>>> instrumentation lookups will add a palpable performance penalty to most 
>>>> ORM operations, and the instrumentation extension is likely not without 
>>>> bugs and regressions at this point.   it was first created over ten years 
>>>> ago to suit the use case of a single user who was working with Zope 
>>>> security proxied objects.    I've seen at least one other person using it, 
>>>> but overall i dont think it's worthwhile to spend lots of time going down 
>>>> tunnels like this; if your dataclass has a few attributes stuck on it, 
>>>> that shouldn't be a problem for any real-world situation.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Thank you in advance.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Kindest regards
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
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>>>> 
>>> 
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>> 
> 
> 
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