Defining the Domain Model

The first change we’ll make to our stock pcreate-generated application will be to define a domain model constructor representing a wiki page. We’ll do this inside our models.py file.

The source code for this tutorial stage can be browsed at http://github.com/Pylons/pyramid/tree/1.3-branch/docs/tutorials/wiki2/src/models/.

Making Edits to models.py

Note

There is nothing special about the filename models.py. A project may have many models throughout its codebase in arbitrarily-named files. Files implementing models often have model in their filenames (or they may live in a Python subpackage of your application package named models) , but this is only by convention.

Open tutorial/tutorial/models.py file and edit it to look like the following:

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from sqlalchemy import (
    Column,
    Integer,
    Text,
    )

from sqlalchemy.ext.declarative import declarative_base

from sqlalchemy.orm import (
    scoped_session,
    sessionmaker,
    )

from zope.sqlalchemy import ZopeTransactionExtension

DBSession = scoped_session(sessionmaker(extension=ZopeTransactionExtension()))
Base = declarative_base()


class Page(Base):
    """ The SQLAlchemy declarative model class for a Page object. """
    __tablename__ = 'pages'
    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    name = Column(Text, unique=True)
    data = Column(Text)

    def __init__(self, name, data):
        self.name = name
        self.data = data

(The highlighted lines are the ones that need to be changed.)

The first thing we’ve done is to do is remove the stock MyModel class from the generated models.py file. The MyModel class is only a sample and we’re not going to use it.

Then, we added a Page class. Because this is a SQLAlchemy application, this class inherits from an instance of sqlalchemy.ext.declarative.declarative_base.

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class Page(Base):
    """ The SQLAlchemy declarative model class for a Page object. """
    __tablename__ = 'pages'
    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    name = Column(Text, unique=True)
    data = Column(Text)

    def __init__(self, name, data):
        self.name = name
        self.data = data

As you can see, our Page class has a class level attribute __tablename__ which equals the string 'pages'. This means that SQLAlchemy will store our wiki data in a SQL table named pages. Our Page class will also have class-level attributes named id, name and data (all instances of sqlalchemy.Column). These will map to columns in the pages table. The id attribute will be the primary key in the table. The name attribute will be a text attribute, each value of which needs to be unique within the column. The data attribute is a text attribute that will hold the body of each page.

Changing scripts/initializedb.py

We haven’t looked at the details of this file yet, but within the scripts directory of your tutorial package is a file named initializedb.py. Code in this file is executed whenever we run the initialize_tutorial_db command (as we did in the installation step of this tutorial).

Since we’ve changed our model, we need to make changes to our initializedb.py script. In particular, we’ll replace our import of MyModel with one of Page and we’ll change the very end of the script to create a Page rather than a MyModel and add it to our DBSession.

Open tutorial/tutorial/scripts/initializedb.py and edit it to look like the following:

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import os
import sys
import transaction

from sqlalchemy import engine_from_config

from pyramid.paster import (
    get_appsettings,
    setup_logging,
    )

from ..models import (
    DBSession,
    Page,
    Base,
    )


def usage(argv):
    cmd = os.path.basename(argv[0])
    print('usage: %s <config_uri>\n'
          '(example: "%s development.ini")' % (cmd, cmd))
    sys.exit(1)


def main(argv=sys.argv):
    if len(argv) != 2:
        usage(argv)
    config_uri = argv[1]
    setup_logging(config_uri)
    settings = get_appsettings(config_uri)
    engine = engine_from_config(settings, 'sqlalchemy.')
    DBSession.configure(bind=engine)
    Base.metadata.create_all(engine)
    with transaction.manager:
        model = Page('FrontPage', 'This is the front page')
        DBSession.add(model)

(Only the highlighted lines need to be changed.)

Reinitializing the Database

Because our model has changed, in order to reinitialize the database, we need to rerun the initialize_tutorial_db command to pick up the changes you’ve made to both the models.py file and to the initializedb.py file. From the root of the tutorial project, directory execute the following commands.

On UNIX:

$ ../bin/initialize_tutorial_db development.ini

On Windows:

c:\pyramidtut\tutorial> ..\Scripts\initialize_tutorial_db development.ini

Success will look something like this:

2011-11-27 01:22:45,277 INFO  [sqlalchemy.engine.base.Engine][MainThread]
                              PRAGMA table_info("pages")
2011-11-27 01:22:45,277 INFO  [sqlalchemy.engine.base.Engine][MainThread] ()
2011-11-27 01:22:45,277 INFO  [sqlalchemy.engine.base.Engine][MainThread]
CREATE TABLE pages (
      id INTEGER NOT NULL,
      name TEXT,
      data TEXT,
      PRIMARY KEY (id),
      UNIQUE (name)
)


2011-11-27 01:22:45,278 INFO  [sqlalchemy.engine.base.Engine][MainThread] ()
2011-11-27 01:22:45,397 INFO  [sqlalchemy.engine.base.Engine][MainThread]
                              COMMIT
2011-11-27 01:22:45,400 INFO  [sqlalchemy.engine.base.Engine][MainThread]
                              BEGIN (implicit)
2011-11-27 01:22:45,401 INFO  [sqlalchemy.engine.base.Engine][MainThread]
                              INSERT INTO pages (name, data) VALUES (?, ?)
2011-11-27 01:22:45,401 INFO  [sqlalchemy.engine.base.Engine][MainThread]
                              ('FrontPage', 'This is the front page')
2011-11-27 01:22:45,402 INFO  [sqlalchemy.engine.base.Engine][MainThread]
                              COMMIT

Viewing the Application in a Browser

We can’t. At this point, our system is in a “non-runnable” state; we’ll need to change view-related files in the next chapter to be able to start the application successfully. If you try to start the application (See Starting the Application), you’ll wind up with a Python traceback on your console that ends with this exception:

ImportError: cannot import name MyModel

This will also happen if you attempt to run the tests.