I felt like I was racing on the Morepath today. My goal was to see how to integrate Morepath with a database. To make this goal practical, I looked into integrating Morepath with SQLAlchemy. To go faster, I borrowed ideas and code liberally from Pyramid.

Tweens

This morning I borrowed the idea of tweens from Pyramid. A tween is basically much like a WSGI framework component, but one that knows about the web framework -- it gets the web framework's request, and it can send the web framework's response, among other things. Now you can write this with Morepath:

@app.tween_factory()
def get_tween_factory(app, handler):
    def wrapping_handler(request, mount):
         reponse = handler(request, mount)
         response.headers['foo'] = 'bar'
         return response
    return wrapping_handler

You can plug in a function that generate a wrapper around the original request handler.

more.transaction

This allows all sorts of neat stuff, including, for Pyramid, pyramid_tm, which integrates Pyramid with the transaction module.

So I ported over this code to Morepath in the form of more.transaction.

To use it in your Morepath app, simply do:

from more.transaction import transaction_app

app = morepath.App(extends=[transaction_app])

What happens now? Morepath will automatically commit the transaction if there is no error (like a 500 error, say).

This means that Morepath now has integration with databases that use the transaction module, such as the ZODB and also SQLALchemy (using zope.sqlalchemy for transaction integration).

[update after someone blindly complains after seeing the word "zope" in a package name... Please don't do that.]

Moreover, you can use multiple such databases in the same application. You can modify the ZODB and a relational database in an application, and be secure that if anything fails during the request handling, none of the databases will changed -- both transactions will be aborted. There's a lot of goodness in the transaction module.

Morepath settings infrastructure

It turns out pyramid_tm is configurable in various ways. It allows you to set the number of attempts it will try to commit in the face of conflicts, for instance. To support this, I had to build Morepath's settings infrastructure; just the part where you can have settings at all, not loading them from a config file -- that's for later.

Here's an example of the settings for the transaction app in more.transaction:

@app.setting_section(section='transaction')
def get_transaction_settings():
    return {
        'attempts': 1,
        'commit_veto': default_commit_veto
        }

These are the defaults defined by more.transaction, but they can be easily overridden in your own app (by writing the same code as above with different values for the configuration).

When I started to write Morepath's settings infrastructure I wrote quite a bit of code involving combining and extending settings, only to throw it away by replacing it with much shorter code that builds on Morepath's config engine that I already use for its other directives. Nice!

morepath_sqlalchemy

Now that I had all the pieces I needed to put them together to demonstrate SQLAlchemy integration: morepath_sqlalchemy.

This uses more.transaction, zope.sqlalchemy and SQLAlchemy together. It's all done here, but I'll summarize the important bits of integration here:

from sqlalchemy.orm import scoped_session, sessionmaker
# SQLAlchemy session
Session = scoped_session(sessionmaker())

from zope.sqlalchemy import register
# register session with transaction module
register(Session)

import morepath
from more.transaction import transaction_app

# create our app, extending transaction_app.
# this means we get Morepath transaction integration
# and default settings for it.
app = morepath.App(extends=[transaction_app])

Quite a day

It's all still rough, needs polishing and documenting, but the foundations are now there. Quite the day of coding! I couldn't have done it without the Pyramid project from which I could borrow many an idea and piece of code.

Now I know Morepath can be integrated with any kind of database -- if transaction module integration is there, like for SQLAlchemy and the ZODB, it is very easy: just use more.transaction. But even if not, it should now be possible to write a tween that does the trick.

Tweens allow other neat things too: I think I saw Pyramid's custom error view system is based on a tween, and I still need custom error views in Morepath...

Interested? Hope to hear from you! Join #morepath on freenode IRC, drop me an email, or leave a comment on the issue tracker.