How to write this in SQL Alchemy - sqlalchemy

Question

I need to write a query in SQL Alchemy to check some string parameters against a field that contains an array of string (Postgre)
city
state
address_line_1
zip_code
phone_numbers
are all of type text[]
select_statement = bdb.get_select_statement(business_schema)\
.where(((text('array[:acity] <# city')
and text('array[:astate] <# state')
and text('array[:aaddress] <# address_line_1'))
or
(text('array[:aaddress] <# address_line_1') and text('array[:azip_code] <# zip_code')))
and (text('array[:aphone] <# phone_numbers')))\
.params(aaddress = address_line_1, acity = city, astate = state, azip_code = zip_code, aphone = phone_number)
The problem is that i receive an exception when I do this, "Boolean value of this clause is not defined".
The plain SQL to be written is:
select * from business where ('address_line1' = ANY (address_line_1)
and 'acity' = ANY (city)
and 'state' = ANY (state)
or
('adress_line1' = ANY (address_line_1) and 'zip' = ANY (zip_code))
and
'phone' = ANY (phone_numbers)
Any ideas on how to do it?,
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

you need to use the and_() and or_() methods, or alternatively the && and || operators, not the Python and and or keywords.
Also, the operations you're doing with array indexing and "<#" are easier to do (in 0.8) like this:
mytable.c.array[:"acity"].op('<#')(mytable.c.city)
see ARRAY.

Answer 2

With SqlAlchemy 0.8, this can be written as:
mytable.c.myarraycolumn.contains(['something'])
Or, with a declrative class:
query.filter(MyTable.myarraycolumn.contains(['something']))
http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/dialects/postgresql.html#sqlalchemy.dialects.postgresql.ARRAY

Answer 3

Here is how we got this to work, in SQLAlchemy 0.9.
SQLAlchemy doesn't know how to convert a Python type into the array element type in these queries. Since our array elements were VARCHAR(256) instead of TEXT, we had to add a cast expression inside the array literal.
session.query.filter(
models.TableClass.arraycolumn.contains(
# contains() generates #>, and #> always takes an array,
# it's more like has-subset
array([
# the array() literal constructor needs an iterable
cast(
'array-element-to-find',
# SQLAlchemy does not know how to convert a Python string
# to an SQL VARCHAR type here
String(256),
)
])
)
).all()
about #> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/functions-array.html
about the array literal http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/dialects/postgresql.html#sqlalchemy.dialects.postgresql.array
note about cast https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sqlalchemy/5aTmT4rUJo4