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Learn how to read, update and delete from a Flask-SQL Alchemy Database

Databases in Flask - Reading, Updating and Deleting

Congratulations! This was maybe a challenging, but hopefully rewarding experience for you. 

In this lesson you learned how to:
1. query all entries with `query.all()`, or fetch an entry based on the value of its primary key with `query.get(id)`.
2. retrieve related objects by using the attributes instantiated with `db.relationship()` in your model (`Reader.query.get(123).reviews.all()`).
3. use `filter` and `filter_by` to select database entries based on some criterion (for example, `Book.query.filter(Book.year = 2020).all()`).
4. filter database entries by analyzing the patterns in their column values (for example, `emails = Reader.query.filter(Reader.email.like('%.%@%')).all()`).
5. add new entries to a database, or how to rollback in case the transaction had erroneous entries.
6. update existing entries in the database (for example, `Reader.query.get(3).email = “new_email@example.com”`).
7. remove database entries (for example, `db.session.delete(Reader.query.get(753))`).
8. combine databases with your web application's templates (views).


The database that we sequentially built throughout the Flask-SQLAlchemy lessons has the following final schema:
![schema](https://content.codecademy.com/programs/flask/databases/books-schema.jpg)

Feel free to further explore all the files included in the final demonstration. You did a great job!

Review

Your database has a number of readers who subscribed to your book club and some books you already assigned to be read. Also some of your readers wrote reviews about the books and some of them might have some annotations made while reading their books on an eReader. The schema representing the database is in the image on the right.

What can you do with the database?

Say you want to list all the books you suggested or list all the subscribed readers. Or let each subscriber see only the reviews they wrote. When new people subscribe to your web service, you need to add them to your database, or when they unsubscribe delete them. If you made a mistake in changing your database, you probably want to undo the changes or 'rollback' to the previous correct state. When your subscribers change their e-mail, you need to update your database. Or you need to filter out the books your club read in the year 2019 and only calculate average ratings of those. These are all the most common interactions with a database, and in this lesson, you will learn how to perform them in Flask-SQLAlchemy. 

Throughout this exercise we will provide you with a database containing some entries for you to query, but you will learn how to add more entries, and remove some, on the way. 

Can't wait? Let's go.

Interacting with a Database

Querying a database table with Flask SQLAlchemy is done through the `query` property of the `Model` class. To get all entries from a model called `TableName` we run `TableName.query.all()`. Often you know the primary key (unique identifier) value of entries you want to fetch. To get an entry with some primary key value `ID` from model `TableName` you run: `TableName.query.get(ID)`. 

For example, to get all the entries from the `Reader` table we do the following:
```python
readers = Reader.query.all()
```

Similarly, to get a reader with `id = 123` we do the following:
```python
reader = Reader.query.get(123)
```

We assign the result of the `.get()` method to a variable because through that variable we can access the entry’s attributes. For example:
```python
reader = Reader.query.get(450)
print(reader.name)
```

Now you see the amazing convenience of using ORM: database tables are simply treated as Python classes and database entries are Python objects. For example, you can easily use a `for` loop to loop through all the readers and print their name:
```python
readers = Reader.query.all()
for reader in readers: 
    print(reader.name)
```
In the image on the right, you can see some entries we already inserted for you in the database, so you can query it.

Queries: query.all() and query.get()

Removing entries is an important aspect of database management and is used often in real-world applications. Users unsubscribe from services, products are removed from web applications, and some relationships are lost (unfollowing other users).

However, before we proceed, we need to be careful about one-to-many relationships. If we remove a reader, we would expect that all the reader’s reviews are also removed from our database. Similarly, removing a book should also remove all the reviews for that book. This procedure is called cascading deletion.  Unfortunately, the way we previously declared our `Reader` and `Book` models will not perform the cascading deletion by default. To enable cascading deletions, we did a naive solution in this exercise by changing our models and re-initializing the database. In practice, database migration management is used to update a database schema.

To enable cascade deletions, we changed the models in the ****app.py**** by adding the `cascade` parameter to the `.relationship()` fields of `Reader` and `Book` models:
```python
reviews = db.relationship('Review', backref='reviewer', lazy='dynamic', cascade = 'all, delete, delete-orphan')
```

In contrast, removing a review does not have any other cascading consequences on `Book` and `Reader` tables. Hence, specifying the cascading deletion option in `Review` is not needed.

Finally, to remove a reader with `id = 753` we use the following command:
```python
db.session.delete(Reader.query.get(753))
```
When you run ****playground.py**** you see that we print all the readers, all the reviews before and after the deletion. You can notice that when the reader with `id = 753` is deleted, all their reviews are deleted as well.
Refer to the image on the right to see the initial entries of some database tables.



Session: Removing database entries

The models we declared contain relationships. Readers write multiple reviews and have multiple annotations. Similarly, books have multiple reviews and multiple annotations. In this exercise we will see how we can fetch all the reviews made by a reader, and to fetch the author of a review. 

######   Fetching many objects
We fetch related objects of some object by accessing its attribute defined with `.relationship()`. For example, to fetch all reviews of a reader with `id = 123` we do the following:
```python
reader = Reader.query.get(123)
reviews_123 = reader.reviews.all()
```
Note that `reviews` attribute was defined as a column in the model for `Reader` using the `.relationship()` method (see ****app.py**** to remind yourself).

######   Fetching one object
For `Review` object we can fetch its authoring `Reader` through the `backref` field specified in `Reader`’s `.relationship()` attribute. For example, to fetch the author of review `id = 111` we do the following:
```python
review = Review.query.get(111)
reviewer_111 = review.reviewer 
```

You can modify the examples above so not to have temporary variables (`reader` and `review_1`) by chaining the operations:
```python
reviews_123 = Reader.query.get(123).reviews.all()
```
and
```python
reviewer_111 = Review.query.get(111).reviewer
```

Notice the subtle difference between the examples above. The first needs `.all()` because one reader can have many reviews. In the second example, we do not use `.all()` since each review is associated with only one reader. That is our one-to-many relationship.


Queries: retrieve related objects

A set of operations such as addition, removal, or updating database entries is called a database transaction. A *database session* consists of one or more transactions. The act of committing ends a transaction by saving the transactions permanently to the database. In contrast, *rollback* rejects the pending transactions and changes are not permanently saved in the database. 

In Flask-SQLAlchemy, a database is changed in the context of a session, which can be accessed as the `session` attribute of the database instance. An entry is added to a session with the `add()` method. The changes in a session are permanently written to a database when `.commit()` is executed.

For example, we create new readers and would like to add them to our database:
```python
from app import db, Reader
new_reader1 = Reader(name = "Nova", surname = "Yeni", email = "nova.yeni@example.com")
new_reader2 = Reader(name = "Nova", surname = "Yuni", email = "nova.yeni@example.com")
new_reader3 = Reader( name = "Tom", surname = "Grey", email = "tom.grey@example.edu")
```
Note that we didn't specify the primary key `id` value. Primary keys don't have to be specified explicitly, and the values are automatically generated after the transaction is committed.

Adding each new entry to the database has the same pattern:
```python
db.session.add(new_reader1)
try:
    db.session.commit()
except:
    db.session.rollback()
```
Notice that we surrounded `db.session.commit()` with a try-except block. Why did we do that? If you look more carefully, `new_reader1` and `new_reader2` have the same e-mail, and when we declared the `Reader` model, we made the e-mail column unique (see the ****app.py**** file). As a consequence, we want to undo the most recent addition to the transaction by using `db.session.rollback()` and continue with other additions without interruption.


Session: add and rollback

Flask-SQLALchemy allows more complex queries and operations such as checking whether a column starts, or ends, with some string. One can also order retrieved queries by some criterion. There are many more possible queries, but here we cover only some of them.

For example, to retrieve e-mails that end with `edu` we do:

```python
education = Reader.query.filter(Reader.email.endswith('edu')).all()
```

To retrieve all the readers with e-mails that contain a '.' before the '@' symbol we use `.like()`:
```python
emails = Reader.query.filter(Reader.email.like('%.%@%')).all()
```
You might recognize the `like` operator from SQL. It is used to search for a specified pattern in a column. The wildcard `%` represents zero, one, or multiple characters.

In the two examples above, we used methods on the column of the table (SQLAlchemy's `ColumnElement`).

To order books by year we use the `.order_by()` method on `Query`:
```python
ordered_books = Book.query.order_by(Book.year).all()
```
We suggest checking the SQLAlchemy Core + ORM documentation to see other querying options.


Queries: more advanced filtering

Often times you don’t want to retrieve all the entries from a table but select only those that satisfy some criterion. Criteria are usually based on the values of the table’s columns. To filter a query, SQLAlchemy provides the `.filter()` method.

For example, to select books from a specific year from the `Book` table we use the following command:
```python
Book.query.filter(Book.year == 2020).all()
```

Notice the additional `.all()` method. `.filter()` returns a `Query` object that needs to be further refined. This can be done by using several additional methods like `.all()` that returns a list of all results,  `.count()` that counts the number of fetched entries, or `.first()` that returns only one result, namely the first one.
```python
Book.query.filter(Book.year == 2020).first()
```

Multiple criteria may be specified as comma separated and the interpretation of a comma is a Boolean `and`:
```python
Review.query.filter(Review.stars <= 3, Review.book_id == 1).all()
```

This query will return all entries in the `Review` table that have fewer than 3 stars for the book with `id = 1`.

Note: there is also the `.filter_by()` method that uses only a simple attribute-value test for filtering.


Queries:  filtering

In this exercise we combine database queries with Jinja templates. In the ****routes.py**** file, besides the `home()` route listing all the books in the database, we also added several routes for displaying web pages with filtered entries from the database. For example, 

```python
@app.route('/books/<year>')
def books(year):
   books = Book.query.filter_by(year = year)
   return render_template('display_books.html', year = year, books = books)
```
is a dynamic route with the `year` variable that can be set to some valid year in the URL. Next, we filter out the books from the asked year and display them using the ****display_books.html**** file (you can find in the templates folder). The template expects the provided `year` and a list of `books` to display. 

In the URL bar of the integrated Web browser on the right, type or copy-paste the following: ****http://localhost:8000/books/2020****. You see all the books suggested in 2020, together with all the reviews for each book. Cool, ha?  

If the list of the retrieved queries is empty, we handle that in the ****display_books.html**** template by outputting that there are no books suggested in that year. Alternatively, one can use 
`.first_or_404()` as we do in the following:
```python
reader = Reader.query.filter_by(id = user_id).first_or_404(description = "There is no user with this ID.")
```
If a reader with some `id` does not exist in the database, 404 error is returned with a custom made message.

Take some time to observe the complete code provided on the right paying attention to ****routes.py****, and explore the templates in the `template` folder.


Queries and templates

Sometimes you will need to update a certain column value of an entry in your database. This is rather easy in the context of SQLAlchemy ORM and is done in the same way you would change Python object’s attribute.

The commands below change the email of a reader with `id=3` and commit the changes to the database:
```python
reader = Reader.query.get(3)
reader.email = “new_email@example.com”
db.session.commit()
```

If you want to undo the update, you can use
```python
db.session.rollback()
```
instead of committing.
