In SQL Alchemy, I have quite a few tables in my database defined. Strangely, every time I want to access an element on that database I have to import the element in the file. It feels wrong (I come from a Perl background and the imports are done lazily in the table file). I tried adding the things meant to be imported into the file with the base table definition, but that results in a cyclic loop apparently and fails to start. Is there something I’m missing? I’ll include a basic example of what the table definitions look like, and how I’m accessing the objects below. (I didn’t create the database, I’m just creating a new system to access it)

Address class:

from sqlalchemy import Column, String, Integer, ForeignKey
from sqlalchemy.orm import relationship, backref

from my_app.db.product import Base

class Address(Base):
    __tablename__ = 'Addresses'

    AddressId = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    ClientId = Column(Integer, ForeignKey('Clients.ClientId'))
    CountryId = Column(Integer, ForeignKey('Countries.CountryId'))
    AddressLine1 = Column(String)
    AddressLine2 = Column(String)
    Town = Column(String)
    County = Column(String)
    PostCode = Column(String)
    BusinessName = Column(String)

    Client = relationship("Client", backref=backref("Addresses"))
    Country = relationship("Country", backref=backref("Addresses"))

    def __init__(self, AddressLine1, AddressLine2, Town, County, PostCode, ClientId,
    BusinessName, CountryId):
        self.AddressLine1 = AddressLine1
        self.AddressLine2 = AddressLine2
        self.Town = Town
        self.County = County
        self.PostCode = PostCode
        self.ClientId = ClientId
        self.BusinessName = BusinessName
        self.IsDeleted = IsDeleted
        self.CountryId = CountryId
        self.IsInvoiceAddress = IsInvoiceAddress

Client class:

from sqlalchemy import Column, String, Integer, DateTime, Double, ForeignKey

from my_app.db.product import Base

class Client(Base):
    __tablename__ = 'Clients'

    ClientId = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    Name = Column(String)
    AccountNo = Column(String)
    Email = Column(String)
    DateCreated = Column(DateTime)

    def __init__(self, Name, AccountNo, Email, DateCreated):
        self.Name = Name
        self.AccountNo = AccountNo
        self.Email = Email
        self.DateCreated = DateCreated

Accessing like (stripped down for simplicity):

from my_app.db.product.address import Address
from my_app.db.product.client import Client

address_rs= session.query(Address).all()

for address in address_rs:
    client = address.Client

The above code works, but I’m not happy with havign to import the Client object as well as the Address object – it becomes unwieldy when I have a lot of joins in a module.

Is there anything I can try to test out and hopefully resolve this? I’m not sure if it’s wrong, but it feels wrong after coming from a Perl DBIx::Class background.