Understanding Why You're Receiving Object Models Instead of Values in SQLAlchemy Queries

Discover how to properly access the data from your SQLAlchemy query results, even when it initially returns object models. Learn the techniques to extract actual values from your results in our detailed guide.
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Understanding Why You're Receiving Object Models Instead of Values in SQLAlchemy Queries

When working with databases in Python, many developers rely on SQLAlchemy as their preferred toolkit and Object Relational Mapper (ORM). However, there can be moments of confusion—like when you execute a query but only get object models in return instead of the actual values. This post will help you understand what's happening and how to fix it.

The Problem: Getting Object Models Instead of Values

Let's look at a key part of the code that leads us to this issue:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

When you execute this code snippet, you might expect to see meaningful data returned, such as id, platform_name, or other fields specified in your StandardRouting class. Instead, if you print the results, you may find something like this:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

These results show a list of object instances representing records in the database, not the actual values you might have hoped for.

The Solution: Accessing Values from Object Models

It's essential to recognize that SQLAlchemy returns instances of mapped classes (in this case, StandardRouting). Each instance corresponds to a row in the database table. To access the actual data within these instances, you need to utilize their attributes as member variables.

Accessing Data from Instances

To retrieve the values from your fetched objects, you can iterate over the collection of objects and print their attributes. Here’s a simple code example showing how to achieve this:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Summary of Steps

Here’s a concise breakdown of how to handle this situation:

Execute your SQLAlchemy query to fetch the data as instances:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Iterate over the result set to access individual attributes from each object:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

Conclusion

While the experience of receiving object models in SQLAlchemy queries might initially seem frustrating, it’s a fundamental aspect of how the ORM operates. By understanding that you are dealing with instances of your mapping classes, you can unlock the power of SQLAlchemy and retrieve the actual data you need.

If you're new to SQLAlchemy, these practices will serve you well as you explore this powerful ORM toolkit in your future projects. Happy coding!