Inheritance Configuration¶

Declarative supports all three forms of inheritance as intuitively as possible. The inherits mapper keyword argument is not needed as declarative will determine this from the class itself. The various “polymorphic” keyword arguments are specified using __mapper_args__.

Joined Table Inheritance¶

Joined table inheritance is defined as a subclass that defines its own table:

class Person(Base):
    __tablename__ = 'people'
    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    discriminator = Column('type', String(50))
    __mapper_args__ = {'polymorphic_on': discriminator}

class Engineer(Person):
    __tablename__ = 'engineers'
    __mapper_args__ = {'polymorphic_identity': 'engineer'}
    id = Column(Integer, ForeignKey('people.id'), primary_key=True)
    primary_language = Column(String(50))

Note that above, the Engineer.id attribute, since it shares the same attribute name as the Person.id attribute, will in fact represent the people.id and engineers.id columns together, with the “Engineer.id” column taking precedence if queried directly. To provide the Engineer class with an attribute that represents only the engineers.id column, give it a different attribute name:

class Engineer(Person):
    __tablename__ = 'engineers'
    __mapper_args__ = {'polymorphic_identity': 'engineer'}
    engineer_id = Column('id', Integer, ForeignKey('people.id'),
                                                primary_key=True)
    primary_language = Column(String(50))

Single Table Inheritance¶

Single table inheritance is defined as a subclass that does not have its own table; you just leave out the __table__ and __tablename__ attributes:

class Person(Base):
    __tablename__ = 'people'
    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    discriminator = Column('type', String(50))
    __mapper_args__ = {'polymorphic_on': discriminator}

class Engineer(Person):
    __mapper_args__ = {'polymorphic_identity': 'engineer'}
    primary_language = Column(String(50))

When the above mappers are configured, the Person class is mapped to the people table before the primary_language column is defined, and this column will not be included in its own mapping. When Engineer then defines the primary_language column, the column is added to the people table so that it is included in the mapping for Engineer and is also part of the table’s full set of columns. Columns which are not mapped to Person are also excluded from any other single or joined inheriting classes using the exclude_properties mapper argument. Below, Manager will have all the attributes of Person and Manager but not the primary_language attribute of Engineer:

class Manager(Person):
    __mapper_args__ = {'polymorphic_identity': 'manager'}
    golf_swing = Column(String(50))

The attribute exclusion logic is provided by the exclude_properties mapper argument, and declarative’s default behavior can be disabled by passing an explicit exclude_properties collection (empty or otherwise) to the __mapper_args__.

Resolving Column Conflicts¶

Note above that the primary_language and golf_swing columns are “moved up” to be applied to Person.__table__, as a result of their declaration on a subclass that has no table of its own. A tricky case comes up when two subclasses want to specify the same column, as below:

class Person(Base):
    __tablename__ = 'people'
    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    discriminator = Column('type', String(50))
    __mapper_args__ = {'polymorphic_on': discriminator}

class Engineer(Person):
    __mapper_args__ = {'polymorphic_identity': 'engineer'}
    start_date = Column(DateTime)

class Manager(Person):
    __mapper_args__ = {'polymorphic_identity': 'manager'}
    start_date = Column(DateTime)

Above, the start_date column declared on both Engineer and Manager will result in an error:

sqlalchemy.exc.ArgumentError: Column 'start_date' on class
<class '__main__.Manager'> conflicts with existing
column 'people.start_date'

In a situation like this, Declarative can’t be sure of the intent, especially if the start_date columns had, for example, different types. A situation like this can be resolved by using declared_attr to define the Column conditionally, taking care to return the existing column via the parent __table__ if it already exists:

from sqlalchemy.ext.declarative import declared_attr

class Person(Base):
    __tablename__ = 'people'
    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    discriminator = Column('type', String(50))
    __mapper_args__ = {'polymorphic_on': discriminator}

class Engineer(Person):
    __mapper_args__ = {'polymorphic_identity': 'engineer'}

    @declared_attr
    def start_date(cls):
        "Start date column, if not present already."
        return Person.__table__.c.get('start_date', Column(DateTime))

class Manager(Person):
    __mapper_args__ = {'polymorphic_identity': 'manager'}

    @declared_attr
    def start_date(cls):
        "Start date column, if not present already."
        return Person.__table__.c.get('start_date', Column(DateTime))

Above, when Manager is mapped, the start_date column is already present on the Person class. Declarative lets us return that Column as a result in this case, where it knows to skip re-assigning the same column. If the mapping is mis-configured such that the start_date column is accidentally re-assigned to a different table (such as, if we changed Manager to be joined inheritance without fixing start_date), an error is raised which indicates an existing Column is trying to be re-assigned to a different owning Table.

The same concept can be used with mixin classes (see Mixin and Custom Base Classes):

class Person(Base):
    __tablename__ = 'people'
    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    discriminator = Column('type', String(50))
    __mapper_args__ = {'polymorphic_on': discriminator}

class HasStartDate(object):
    @declared_attr
    def start_date(cls):
        return cls.__table__.c.get('start_date', Column(DateTime))

class Engineer(HasStartDate, Person):
    __mapper_args__ = {'polymorphic_identity': 'engineer'}

class Manager(HasStartDate, Person):
    __mapper_args__ = {'polymorphic_identity': 'manager'}

The above mixin checks the local __table__ attribute for the column. Because we’re using single table inheritance, we’re sure that in this case, cls.__table__ refers to Person.__table__. If we were mixing joined- and single-table inheritance, we might want our mixin to check more carefully if cls.__table__ is really the Table we’re looking for.

Concrete Table Inheritance¶

Concrete is defined as a subclass which has its own table and sets the concrete keyword argument to True:

class Person(Base):
    __tablename__ = 'people'
    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    name = Column(String(50))

class Engineer(Person):
    __tablename__ = 'engineers'
    __mapper_args__ = {'concrete':True}
    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    primary_language = Column(String(50))
    name = Column(String(50))

Usage of an abstract base class is a little less straightforward as it requires usage of polymorphic_union(), which needs to be created with the Table objects before the class is built:

engineers = Table('engineers', Base.metadata,
                Column('id', Integer, primary_key=True),
                Column('name', String(50)),
                Column('primary_language', String(50))
            )
managers = Table('managers', Base.metadata,
                Column('id', Integer, primary_key=True),
                Column('name', String(50)),
                Column('golf_swing', String(50))
            )

punion = polymorphic_union({
    'engineer':engineers,
    'manager':managers
}, 'type', 'punion')

class Person(Base):
    __table__ = punion
    __mapper_args__ = {'polymorphic_on':punion.c.type}

class Engineer(Person):
    __table__ = engineers
    __mapper_args__ = {'polymorphic_identity':'engineer', 'concrete':True}

class Manager(Person):
    __table__ = managers
    __mapper_args__ = {'polymorphic_identity':'manager', 'concrete':True}

The helper classes AbstractConcreteBase and ConcreteBase provide automation for the above system of creating a polymorphic union. See the documentation for these helpers as well as the main ORM documentation on concrete inheritance for details.

SQLAlchemy 1.2 Documentation