Creating a self-referencing M2M relationship in SQLAlchemy (+Flask) - sqlalchemy

Question

While trying to learn Flask, I am building a simple Twitter clone. This would include the ability for a User to follow other Users. I am trying to set up a relational database through SQLAlchemy to allow this.
I figured I would need a self-referencing many-to-many relationship on the User. Following from the SQLAlchemy documentation I arrived at:
#imports omitted
app = Flask(__name__)
app.config['SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI'] = 'sqlite:///twitclone.db'
db = SQLAlchemy(app)
Base = declarative_base()
user_to_user = Table("user_to_user", Base.metadata,
Column("follower_id", Integer, ForeignKey("user.id"), primary_key=True),
Column("followed_id", Integer, ForeignKey("user.id"), primary_key=True)
)
class User(db.Model):
__tablename__ = 'user'
id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
name = Column(String, unique=False)
handle = Column(String, unique=True)
password = Column(String, unique=False)
children = relationship("tweet")
following = relationship("user",
secondary=user_to_user,
primaryjoin=id==user_to_user.c.follower_id,
secondaryjoin=id==user_to_user.c.followed_id,
backref="followed_by"
)
#Tweet class goes here
db.create_all()
if __name__ == "__main__":
app.run()
Running this code results in the database being created without any error messages. However, the whole part (table) connecting a user to a user is simply omitted. This is the definition of the User table:
CREATE TABLE user (
id INTEGER NOT NULL,
name VARCHAR,
handle VARCHAR,
password VARCHAR,
PRIMARY KEY (id),
UNIQUE (handle)
)
Why does SQLAlchemy not create the self-referential relationship for the User?
note: I am new to both Flask and SQLAlchemy and could be missing something obvious here.

Answer 1

Ok, it seems I mixed up two different styles of using SQLAlchemy with Flask: the declarative extension of SQLAlchemy and flask-sqlalchemy extension. Both are similar in capabilities with the difference being that the flask extension has some goodies like session handling. This is how I rewrote my code to strictly make use of flask-sqlalchemy.
from flask import Flask
from flask.ext.sqlalchemy import SQLAlchemy
from datetime import datetime
app = Flask(__name__)
app.config['SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI'] = 'sqlite:///kwek.db'
db = SQLAlchemy(app)
#Table to handle the self-referencing many-to-many relationship for the User class:
#First column holds the user who follows, the second the user who is being followed.
user_to_user = db.Table('user_to_user',
db.Column("follower_id", db.Integer, db.ForeignKey("user.id"), primary_key=True),
db.Column("followed_id", db.Integer, db.ForeignKey("user.id"), primary_key=True)
)
class User(db.Model):
__tablename__ = 'user'
id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
name = db.Column(db.String(64), unique=False)
handle = db.Column(db.String(16), unique=True)
password = db.Column(db.String, unique=False)
kweks = db.relationship("Kwek", lazy="dynamic")
following = db.relationship("User",
secondary=user_to_user,
primaryjoin=id==user_to_user.c.follower_id,
secondaryjoin=id==user_to_user.c.followed_id,
backref="followed_by"
)
def __repr__(self):
return '<User %r>' % self.name
class Kwek(db.Model):
__tablename__ = 'kwek'
id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
content = db.Column(db.String(140), unique=False)
post_date = db.Column(db.DateTime, default=datetime.now())
user_id = db.Column(db.Integer, db.ForeignKey('user.id'))
def __repr__(self):
return '<Kwek %r>' % self.content
if __name__ == "__main__":
app.run()