Using upload_data on Google AppEngine doesn't let me update entities with id based keys

Question

This seems so basic - I must be missing something.

I am trying to download my entities, update a few properties, and upload the entities. I'm using the Django nonrel & appengine projects, so all the entities are stored as id rather than name.

I can download the entities to csv fine, but when I upload (via appcfg.py upload_data ...), the keys come in as name=... rather than id=...

In the config file, I added -

   import_transform: transform.create_foreign_key('auth_user', key_is_id=True)

to see if this would, as the documentation for transform states, "convert the key into an integer to be used as an id." With this import_transform, I get this error -

ErrorOnTransform: Numeric keys are not supported on input at this time.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

As the error message indicates, overwriting entities with numeric IDs isn't currently supported. You may be able to work around it by providing a post-upload function that recreates the entity with the relevant key, but I'd suggest stepping back and analyzing why you're doing this - why not just update the entities in-place on App Engine, or use remote_api to do this? Doing a bulk download and upload seems a cumbersome way to handle it.