authanor 0.2.0

A Pythonic SQLALchemy interface to enforce authorization criteria.

Authanor

A tool providing a a Pythonic interface to SQLAlchemy while enforcing authorization criteria for Flask.

SQLAlchemy provides a phenomenal interface for querying a database. However, this package is designed to enable the construction of handler objects that perform a series of consistent actions on many similar ORM entities. For example, it is common to want to select all values in a given table using an ORM, or add an entry to the table based on a mapping. These are easy to do using SQLAlchemy, but my experience is that things get a bit more challenging when a query must be limited to a single authorized user (and several joins are required to filter that query).

It's possible I'm missing a key functionality of SQLAlchemy that enables this behavior elegantly, but I haven't found a clean way to do it yet. Until I become so enlightened, this package creates an interface where each model may define the chain of joins required to establish whether it belongs to an authorized user, and then a handler to query the database and perform those joins for each query. This is designed to be extensible, since I often want this behavior available for the majority of ORM models in my application.

If you read this and think "This dude's dumb; why on Earth didn't he use this functionality baked into SQLAlchemy?" drop me a line because I'm interested to know what I'm missing.

Installation

The Authanor package is registered on the Python Package Index (PyPI) for easy installation. To install the package, simply run

$ pip install authanor

The package requires a recent version of Python (3.9+).

License

This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License, Version 3. It is fully open-source, and while you are more than welcome to fork, add, modify, etc. it is required that you keep any distributed changes and additions open-source.

Changes

Changes between versions are tracked in the changelog.