SQLAlchemy DetachedInstanceError with regular attribute (not a relation)

Question

I just started using SQLAlchemy and get a DetachedInstanceError and can't find much information on this anywhere. I am using the instance outside a session, so it is natural that SQLAlchemy is unable to load any relations if they are not already loaded, however, the attribute I am accessing is not a relation, in fact this object has no relations at all. I found solutions such as eager loading, but I can't apply to this because this is not a relation. I even tried "touching" this attribute before closing the session, but it still doesn't prevent the exception. What could be causing this exception for a non-relational property even after it has been successfully accessed once before? Any help in debugging this issue is appreciated. I will meanwhile try to get a reproducible stand-alone scenario and update here.

Update: This is the actual exception message with a few stacks:

  File "/home/hari/bin/lib/python2.6/site-packages/SQLAlchemy-0.6.1-py2.6.egg/sqlalchemy/orm/attributes.py", line 159, in __get__
    return self.impl.get(instance_state(instance), instance_dict(instance))
  File "/home/hari/bin/lib/python2.6/site-packages/SQLAlchemy-0.6.1-py2.6.egg/sqlalchemy/orm/attributes.py", line 377, in get
    value = callable_(passive=passive)
  File "/home/hari/bin/lib/python2.6/site-packages/SQLAlchemy-0.6.1-py2.6.egg/sqlalchemy/orm/state.py", line 280, in __call__
    self.manager.deferred_scalar_loader(self, toload)
  File "/home/hari/bin/lib/python2.6/site-packages/SQLAlchemy-0.6.1-py2.6.egg/sqlalchemy/orm/mapper.py", line 2323, in _load_scalar_attributes
    (state_str(state)))
DetachedInstanceError: Instance <ReportingJob at 0xa41cd8c> is not bound to a Session; attribute refresh operation cannot proceed

The partial model looks like this:

metadata = MetaData()
ModelBase = declarative_base(metadata=metadata)

class ReportingJob(ModelBase):
    __tablename__ = 'reporting_job'

    job_id         = Column(BigInteger, Sequence('job_id_sequence'), primary_key=True)
    client_id      = Column(BigInteger, nullable=True)

And the field client_id is what is causing this exception with a usage like the below:

Query:

    jobs = session \
            .query(ReportingJob) \
            .filter(ReportingJob.job_id == job_id) \
            .all()
    if jobs:
        # FIXME(Hari): Workaround for the attribute getting lazy-loaded.
        jobs[0].client_id
        return jobs[0]

This is what triggers the exception later out of the session scope:

        msg = msg + ", client_id: %s" % job.client_id

Answer 1

I found the root cause while trying to narrow down the code that caused the exception. I placed the same attribute access code at different places after session close and found that it definitely doesn't cause any issue immediately after the close of query session. It turns out the problem starts appearing after closing a fresh session that is opened to update the object. Once I understood that the state of the object is unusable after a session close, I was able to find this thread that discussed this same issue. Two solutions that come out of the thread are:

• Keep a session open (which is obvious)
• Specify expire_on_commit=False to sessionmaker().

The 3rd option is to manually set expire_on_commit to False on the session once it is created, something like: session.expire_on_commit = False. I verified that this solves my issue.