How can I update a row’s information?

For example I’d like to alter the name column of the row that has the id 5.

Retrieve an object using the tutorial shown in the Flask-SQLAlchemy documentation. Once you have the entity that you want to change, change the entity itself. Then, db.session.commit().

For example:

admin = User.query.filter_by(username='admin').first()
admin.email = 'my_new_email@example.com'
db.session.commit()

user = User.query.get(5)
user.name = 'New Name'
db.session.commit()

Flask-SQLAlchemy is based on SQLAlchemy, so be sure to check out the SQLAlchemy Docs as well.

There is a method update on BaseQuery object in SQLAlchemy, which is returned by filter_by.

admin = User.query.filter_by(username='admin').update(dict(email='my_new_email@example.com')))
db.session.commit()

The advantage of using update over changing the entity comes when there are many objects to be updated.

If you want to give add_user permission to all the admins,

rows_changed = User.query.filter_by(role='admin').update(dict(permission='add_user'))
db.session.commit()

Notice that filter_by takes keyword arguments (use only one =) as opposed to filter which takes an expression.

This does not work if you modify a pickled attribute of the model. Pickled attributes should be replaced in order to trigger updates:

from flask import Flask
from flask.ext.sqlalchemy import SQLAlchemy
from pprint import pprint

app = Flask(__name__)
app.config['SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI'] = 'sqllite:////tmp/users.db'
db = SQLAlchemy(app)


class User(db.Model):
    id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
    name = db.Column(db.String(80), unique=True)
    data = db.Column(db.PickleType())

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

    def __repr__(self):
        return '<User %r>' % self.username

db.create_all()

# Create a user.
bob = User('Bob', {})
db.session.add(bob)
db.session.commit()

# Retrieve the row by its name.
bob = User.query.filter_by(name='Bob').first()
pprint(bob.data)  # {}

# Modifying data is ignored.
bob.data['foo'] = 123
db.session.commit()
bob = User.query.filter_by(name='Bob').first()
pprint(bob.data)  # {}

# Replacing data is respected.
bob.data = {'bar': 321}
db.session.commit()
bob = User.query.filter_by(name='Bob').first()
pprint(bob.data)  # {'bar': 321}

# Modifying data is ignored.
bob.data['moo'] = 789
db.session.commit()
bob = User.query.filter_by(name='Bob').first()
pprint(bob.data)  # {'bar': 321}

Just assigning the value and committing them will work for all the data types but JSON and Pickled attributes. Since pickled type is explained above I’ll note down a slightly different but easy way to update JSONs.

class User(db.Model):
    id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
    name = db.Column(db.String(80), unique=True)
    data = db.Column(db.JSON)

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

Let’s say the model is like above.

user = User("Jon Dove", {"country":"Sri Lanka"})
db.session.add(user)
db.session.flush()
db.session.commit()

This will add the user into the MySQL database with data {“country”:”Sri Lanka”}

Modifying data will be ignored. My code that didn’t work is as follows.

user = User.query().filter(User.name=='Jon Dove')
data = user.data
data["province"] = "south"
user.data = data
db.session.merge(user)
db.session.flush()
db.session.commit()

Instead of going through the painful work of copying the JSON to a new dict (not assigning it to a new variable as above), which should have worked I found a simple way to do that. There is a way to flag the system that JSONs have changed.

Following is the working code.

from sqlalchemy.orm.attributes import flag_modified
user = User.query().filter(User.name=='Jon Dove')
data = user.data
data["province"] = "south"
user.data = data
flag_modified(user, "data")
db.session.merge(user)
db.session.flush()
db.session.commit()

This worked like a charm. There is another method proposed along with this method here Hope I’ve helped some one.