Just a quick follow up to my last post on adding the ability to add some tools to help serialize SqlAlchemy instances. I needed to do the reverse. I want to take the POST’d values from a form submission and tack them onto one of my models. So I now also add a fromdict() method onto base that looks like.

def fromdict(self, values):
    """Merge in items in the values dict into our object if it's one of our columns

    """
    for c in self.__table__.columns:
        if c.name in values:
            setattr(self, c.name, values[c.name])


Base.fromdict = fromdict

So in my controllers I can start doing

def controller(self):
    obj = SomeObj()
    obj.fromdict(request.POST)
    Session.add(obj)