TurboGears supports MongoDB out of the box by using the Ming ORM. Ming was made to look like SQLAlchemy, so if you are proficient with SQLAlchemy and MongoDB it should be easy for you to get used to the Ming query language. This also makes easy to port a TurboGears SQLAlchemy based application to MongoDB.
To create a project using MongoDB you just need to pass the --ming option to the gearbox quickstart command.
$ gearbox quickstart --ming
The quickstarted project will provide an authentication and authorization layer like the one that is provided for the SQLAlchemy version. This means that you will have the same users and groups you had on the standard quickstarted project and also that all the predicates to check for authorization should work like before.
The main difference is that you won’t be able to use the application without having a running MongoDB database on the local machine.
By default the application will try to connect to a server on port 27017 on local machine using a database that has the same name of your package.
This can be changed by editing the development.ini file:
ming.url = mongodb://localhost:27017/
ming.db = myproject
Now that everything is in place to start using MongoDB as your database server you just need to proceed the usual way by filling your database.
$ gearbox setup-app
The quickstart command from above will create the authentication collections and setup a default user/password for you:
user: manager
password: managepass
If you don’t know how Ming works at all, please take a few minutes to read over these tutorials:
Your quickstarted project will have a subpackage called model, made up of the following files:
By default TurboGears configures Ming in Declarative mode. This is similar to the SQLAlchemy declarative support and needs each model to inherit from the MappedClass class.
The tables defined by the quickstart in model/auth.py are based on the declarative method, so you may want to check it out to see how columns are defined for these tables. For more information, you may read the ORM Tutorial.
Once you have defined your collections in a separate module in the model package, they should be imported from model/__init__.py. So the end of this file would look like this:
# Import your model modules here.
from auth import User, Permission
# Say you defined these three classes in the 'movies'
# module of your 'model' package.
from movies import Movie, Actor, Director
TurboGears supports also automatic indexing of MongoDB fields. If you want to guarantee that a field is unique or indexed you just have to specify the unique_indexes or indexes variables for the __mongometa__ attribute of the mapped class.
class Permission(MappedClass):
class __mongometa__:
session = DBSession
name = 'tg_permission'
unique_indexes = [('permission_name',),]
TurboGears will ensure indexes for your each time the application is started, this is performed inside the init_model function.
Ming comes with support to one-to-many and many-to-one Relations they provide an easy to use access to related objects. The fact that this relation is read only isn’t a real issue as the related objects will have a ForeignIdProperty which can be changed to add or remove objects to the relation.
As MongoDB provides too many ways to express a many-to-many relationship, those kind of relations are instead left on their own. TurboGears anyway provides a tool to make easier to access and modify those relationships.
tgming.ProgrammaticRelationProperty provides easy access to those relationships exposing them as a list while leaving to the developer the flexibility to implement the relationship as it best suites the model.
A good example of how the ProgrammaticRelationProperty works is the User to Group relationship:
from tgming import ProgrammaticRelationProperty
class Group(MappedClass):
class __mongometa__:
session = DBSession
name = 'tg_group'
group_name = FieldProperty(s.String)
class User(MappedClass):
class __mongometa__:
session = DBSession
name = 'tg_user'
_groups = FieldProperty(s.Array(str))
def _get_groups(self):
return Group.query.find(dict(group_name={'$in':self._groups})).all()
def _set_groups(self, groups):
self._groups = [group.group_name for group in groups]
groups = ProgrammaticRelationProperty(Group, _get_groups, _set_groups)
In this case each user will have one or more groups stored with their group_name inside the User._groups array. Accessing User.groups will provide a list of the groups the user is part of. This list is retrieved using User._get_groups and can be set with User._set_groups.
There are cases when you will want to adapt a value from the database before loading and storing it. A simple example of this case is the password field, this will probably be encrypted with some kind of algorithm which has to be applied before saving the field itself.
To handle those cases TurboGears provides the tgming.SynonymProperty accessor. This provides a way to hook two functions which have to be called before storing and retrieving the value to adapt it.
from tgming import SynonymProperty
class User(MappedClass):
class __mongometa__:
session = DBSession
name = 'tg_user'
_password = FieldProperty(s.String)
def _set_password(self, password):
self._password = self._hash_password(password)
def _get_password(self):
return self._password
password = SynonymProperty(_get_password, _set_password)
In the previous example the password property is stored encrypted inside the User._password field but it is accessed using the User.password property which encrypts it automatically before setting it.