sqlalchemy The ORM Converting a query result to dict

Example

First the setup for the example:

import datetime as dt
from sqlalchemy import Column, Date, Integer, Text, create_engine, inspect
from sqlalchemy.orm import sessionmaker
from sqlalchemy.ext.declarative import declarative_base

Base = declarative_base()
Session = sessionmaker()

class User(Base):
    __tablename__ = 'users'

    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    name = Column(Text, nullable=False)
    birthday = Column(Date)

engine = create_engine('sqlite://')
Base.metadata.create_all(bind=engine)
Session.configure(bind=engine)

session = Session()
session.add(User(name='Alice', birthday=dt.date(1990, 1, 1)))
session.commit()

If you're querying columns individually, the row is a KeyedTuple which has an _asdict method. The method name starts with a single underscore, to match the namedtuple API (it's not private!).

query = session.query(User.name, User.birthday)
for row in query:
    print(row._asdict())

When using the ORM to retrieve objects, this is not available by default. The SQLAlchemy inspection system should be used.

def object_as_dict(obj):
    return {c.key: getattr(obj, c.key)
            for c in inspect(obj).mapper.column_attrs}

query = session.query(User)
for user in query:
    print(object_as_dict(user))

Here, we created a function to do the conversion, but one option would be to add a method to the base class.

Instead of using declarative_base as above, you can create it from your own class:

from sqlalchemy.ext.declarative import as_declarative

@as_declarative()
class Base:
    def _asdict(self):
        return {c.key: getattr(self, c.key)
                for c in inspect(self).mapper.column_attrs}