CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythongoogle-app-engine
Stephen Cagle
Stephen Cagle

Reputation: 14524

How should I deal with a circular import in Google App Engine?

If I have "a.py"

from google.appengine.ext import db
class A(db.Model):
    db.ReferenceProperty(b.B)
    ...other stuff

and another file "b.py"

from google.appengine.ext import db
class B(db.Model):
    db.ReferenceProperty(a.A)
    ...other stuff

It would appear that Python simply does not allow circular dependencies. Normally I guess you would alter the code such that the two classes actually can resolve themselves without importing one another directly. Perhaps by consolidating their reference to one another through a third intermediary? But I can't just use a normal intermediary class, as all classes would ultimately need to be persisted to the database? Is there any correct solution to structuring the above code such that it works?

I have a feeling that I am going to get a lot of "bad smelling code", "decouple", "bad design", etc comments. So I ask that if you say that, please illustrate what you would do with an actual example. Are there any solutions that would involve leaving the references, classes, and modules as they stand?

Thank you.

Upvotes: 9

Views: 599

Answers (4)

bobobobo
bobobobo

Reputation: 67224

Technically speaking, you can replace the circular dependency with an intersection table.

In my case, I have denormalized models, Player and Match.

The relationship between Matches and Players is many-to-many, (a Player has played one-or-more matches, and a Match references one-or-more players).

What I needed:

class Match(db.Model):
    p1 = db.ReferenceProperty( Player )
    p2 = db.ReferenceProperty( Player )

class Player(db.Model):
    # Remember what match player is currently in, for victor reporting
    currentMatch = db.ReferenceProperty( Match )

Option 0: What Wooble suggested

Option 1: Normalize it (use an intersection table)

class Match(db.Model):
    # ...

class Player(db.Model):
    # ...

# Every match has multiple entries here (as many 1 for
# each player-in-match entry).  This will make retrieval
# slower, but more-correct (it is "normalized" now)
class PlayersInMatches(db.Model):
    player=db.ReferenceProperty(Player)
    match=db.ReferenceProperty(Match)
    isCurrent=db.BooleanProperty()

Upvotes: 0

Wooble
Wooble

Reputation: 89847

The workaround is to have a ReferenceProperty in at least one of the models that doesn't restrict itself to a particular class, and then enforce only referencing that class in your own code.

e.g., 

class A(db.Model):
  b = db.ReferenceProperty()

class B(db.Model):
  a = db.ReferenceProperty(A)

You'll be able to assign any model instance to the b variable; just make sure you only assign actual Bs.

Upvotes: 7

codeape
codeape

Reputation: 100756

According to the documentation:

ReferenceProperty has another handy feature: back-references. When a model has a ReferenceProperty to another model, each referenced entity gets a property whose value is a Query that returns all of the entities of the first model that refer to it.

So you should probably be able to use the automatically added back-reference.

Upvotes: 1

Chase Seibert
Chase Seibert

Reputation: 15841

What happens if you define both models in the same module? e.g. a_b.py

Upvotes: 1

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