MongoDB for Developers with Python Transcripts
Chapter: Mapping classes to MongoDB with the ODM MongoEngine
Lecture: Introducing ODMs
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Now we've got to a serious place in the course where we're going to write some real code and work with some realistic complex demos,
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and we're going to do that using what's called an odm, an object document mapper.
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So an object document mapper is like an orm, an object relational mapper but in NoSQL, we don't have relations we have documents
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so we're going to map documents to objects rather than navigate and traverse these relationships, and the one we're going to focus on for this course,
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my favorite one, I think is one of the best, if not the best is something called MongoEngine.
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So before we get to MongoEngine, let's just look at the overall goal here, and the features of the odm vary whether you're talking MongoEngine
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or something different, but they generally follow the same principles. So with PyMongo, this is the low level api
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we have our app and we have PyMongo, we'll talk to the database; so when we write a query that talks to PyMongo,
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we work in the Python api and we send Python dictionaries to it, which either have the prototypical documents in it
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or the high level operators, in place update operators and things like that like $addToSet,
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but in order to do that, we basically write in the raw MongoDB api, as we've seen the only real change that we go through
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to go from the raw shell api of Javascript over to Python is we're working with dictionaries and not json, and we're working with Pythonic names,
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so insert_one has the underscore and lower case in Python, not in Javascript, but this means you're working at a super low level
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and for certain operations and some of the time this makes tons of sense, it is one of the faster ways to work with MongoDB from Python.
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However, most of the time, we much, much prefer having high level concepts in our application that enforce additional things
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that automatically use the best features of the PyMongo and MongoDB api without us having to think about how that happens.
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So that's when we can bring in an odm, we have the same thing, we got our app, now we're going to have our odm plus PyMongo,
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we're going to issue a query, but this time we're not going to write in raw api code we're going to actually issue the queries in terms of classes,
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think SQLAlchemy, think Django orm type of queries here. So we might have a book class given our previous example,
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so we'd go to the book and we'd say find based on the isbn equals this and so on, all right, so it's very similar to the Django orm
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and some of the other orms that you might be familiar with. So we work in these high level classes, and that's great
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and it translates of course down to the PyMongo api, what's better though, what's really great is
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it actually leverages the really advanced in place operator, so at least speaking of MongoEngine specifically now,
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if we say pull back a class, an instance of a class and we make a change to say for the book, we change the title and we call save,
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it's actually going to do a dollar set operation, in place update it's not just going to push the whole book back into the database
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with all the optimistic concurrency issues you might run into, no, it's going to make the changes in the best way possible.
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So we'll see that we'll be able to use these advanced operators without actually doing anything other
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than just working with classes and objects in memory, it's really really sweet; we'll also have additional features,
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it automatically works with indexes for us, it will automatically add type checking and other types of constraints
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that simply don't exist in the database, but can be managed at the class level in the object level and described there.
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So here's the string field, here's an integer field and the integer has to be greater than ten,
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all of that stuff can be done through MongoEngine, in our application but the concept of that doesn't even exist in MongoDb, right,
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so you get a lot more structured, a lot more safety in it by basically describing your schema in classes
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and long as you stick to one application or share that class definition across applications, you're in a much safer place
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than just randomly sending dictionaries at the database. So this odm style of programming, I find it to be extremely productive,
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very clear and quite safe, neat, fast for most of what we got to do, that's really my favorite way to work with MongoDB,
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and I hope you'll see the power of it and enjoy it after we go through in this chapter.