Utilizing Metaprogramming in Python

Your team is considering writing their own object relational mapper, and they've asked you to start by creating an easy way for them to create a class and have it automatically have "getter" class methods to search the database based on properties. Utilizing annotations for fields, they'd like to have class methods like get_by_name added to the class if there was a class annotation for name: str. Here is an example:

class Post(metaclass=ModelClass):
    # if not defined, it would default to `post`.
    # For a multi-word class it would default to all lowercase, snake_cases
    # Eg. BlogPost would default to blog_post table.
    __tablename__ = "posts"

    title: str
    content: str
    published: bool

posts_query = Post.get_by_title("Example")
posts_query == "select * from posts where title = 'Example'"

new_post = Post("New Title", "This is my content", False)

To achieve this, we'll need to have the metaclass create an initializer based on the annotations and also add get_by_xxx methods based on these same annotations. Because we're not working with an actual database yet, we're just going to have these functions return the query. This query will generally follow the same patterns:

select * from [__tablename__] where [field_name] = value

There are a lot of things to consider when creating an ORM, but your job is to work on creating a good model metaclass to make creating a new model incredibly easy.

There are some automated tests for this process. You can run all of the unit tests with the following command:

$ python -m unittest
...
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 3 tests in 0.004s

OK