Convert sqlalchemy row object to python dict

Question

or a simple way to iterate over columnName, value pairs?

My version of sqlalchemy is 0.5.6

Here is the sample code where I tried using dict(row), but it throws exception , TypeError: 'User' object is not iterable

import sqlalchemy
from sqlalchemy import *
from sqlalchemy.ext.declarative import declarative_base
from sqlalchemy.orm import sessionmaker

print "sqlalchemy version:",sqlalchemy.__version__ 

engine = create_engine('sqlite:///:memory:', echo=False)
metadata = MetaData()
users_table = Table('users', metadata,
     Column('id', Integer, primary_key=True),
     Column('name', String),
)
metadata.create_all(engine) 

class User(declarative_base()):
    __tablename__ = 'users'

    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    name = Column(String)

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

Session = sessionmaker(bind=engine)
session = Session()

user1 = User("anurag")
session.add(user1)
session.commit()

# uncommenting next line throws exception 'TypeError: 'User' object is not iterable'
#print dict(user1)
# this one also throws 'TypeError: 'User' object is not iterable'
for u in session.query(User).all():
    print dict(u)

Running this code on my system outputs:

sqlalchemy version: 0.5.6
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "untitled-1.py", line 37, in <module>
    print dict(u)
TypeError: 'User' object is not iterable

Answer 1

for row in resultproxy:
    row_as_dict = dict(row)

Answer 2

For now I am using

def row2dict(row):
    d = {}
    for columnName in row.__table__.columns.keys():
        d[columnName] = getattr(row, columnName)

    return d

Answer 3

The expression you are iterating through evaluates to list of model objects, not rows. So the following is correct usage of them:

for u in session.query(User).all():
    print u.id, u.name

Do you realy need to convert them to dicts? Sure, there is a lot of ways, but then you don't need ORM part of SQLAlchemy:

result = session.execute(User.__table__.select())
for row in result:
    print dict(row)

Update: Take a look at sqlalchemy.orm.attributes module. It has a set of functions to work with object state, that might be useful for you, especially instance_dict().

Answer 4

class User(object):
    def to_dict(self):
        return dict([(k, getattr(self, k)) for k in self.__dict__.keys() if not k.startswith("_")])

That should work.

Answer 5

from sqlalchemy.orm import class_mapper

def asdict(obj):
    return dict((col.name, getattr(obj, col.name))
                for col in class_mapper(obj.__class__).mapped_table.c)

Answer 6

I have a variation on Marco Mariani's answer, expressed as a decorator. The main difference is that it'll handle lists of entities, as well as safely ignoring some other types of return values (which is very useful when writing tests using mocks):

@decorator
def to_dict(f, *args, **kwargs):
  result = f(*args, **kwargs)
  if is_iterable(result) and not is_dict(result):
    return map(asdict, result)

  return asdict(result)

def asdict(obj):
  return dict((col.name, getattr(obj, col.name))
              for col in class_mapper(obj.__class__).mapped_table.c)

def is_dict(obj):
  return isinstance(obj, dict)

def is_iterable(obj):
  return True if getattr(obj, '__iter__', False) else False