Accessing all columns from MySQL table using flask sqlalchemy

Question

I'm trying to get the columns for a MySQL table whether in a string or a list format.

Since I defined the table through my main app, I could use dir(table_name) to get a list of attributes but those contain private attributes and other built-in attributes like "query" or "query_class". Filtering these would be possible but I'm trying to find an easier way to get the columns without going through the attribute route.

Between reading the flask-sqlalchemy documentation and sqlalchemy documentation, I noticed that using table_name.c will work for sqlalchelmy. Is there an equivalent for flask-sqlalchemy?

Answer 1

Flask-SQLAlchemy does nothing to the SQLAlchemy side of things, it is just a wrapper to make it easier to use with Flask along with some convenience features. You can inspect orm objects the same way you normally would. For example, inspecting a model returns its mapper.

m = db.inspect(MyModel)
# all orm attributes
print(list(m.all_orm_descriptors.keys()))
# just the columns
print(list(m.columns.keys()))
# etc.