Attributes in the Pythonic, TTM-inspired interface to PostgreSQL

The Third Manifesto‘s Relational Model (RM) prescription 9 defines a relation heading as “a set of ordered pairs or attributes of the form <A,T>,” where A is the name of the attribute and T is the name of the declared type of the attribute. It then defines a tuple value (or tuple for short) as a set of ordered triples of form <A,T,v> where v is an arbitrary value of type T, called the attribute value.

Class Attribute of the TTM-inspired interface to PostgreSQL models the latter ordered triple rather than the ordered pair. I considered implementing the pair, say as AttribType, and deriving Attribute from it, but opted for the leaner, no-hierarchy solution for now.

An Attribute object should be initialized with a name, Python type and a value. However, only the name is required. The default type is str and for Python 2, unicode is treated almost as a synonym for str (I realize this goes against everything that your mother taught you, but I’m hoping that widespread Python 3 adoption will make this moot soon).

I wholehearteadly agree with TTM RM proscription 5 banning attributes that do not have a value, i.e., like SQL NULLs. However, I hope the interface is useful on existing databases, so in the interest of practicality, class Attribute has two additional, optional arguments: nullable and sysdefault. The former is to specify that an attribute allows NULLs (or None in Python). The latter can be used to indicate the corresponding table column has an SQL DEFAULT specification (this includes those defined as SERIAL or BIGSERIAL).

If an attribute is not nullable and not sysdefault, a value must be specified. If omitted, a suitable default is created based on the type (if possible), i.e., an empty string for str, 0 for int, 0.0 for float. If the attribute is nullable, empty string, 0 or 0.0 are converted to None. This approach is to facilitate dealing with empty HTML form fields, i.e., if the user skips a nullable field, the attribute should end up as a NULL in the database.

If a value is provided, the code raises ValueError if the value does not agree with the specified (or defaulted) Python type. The only exceptions are that an int value is cast to float, and a unicode value is allowed if the type is str and we’re working in Python 2.x.