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open ended discussion: use of PEP 593 in the "model" ecosystem #229

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@adriangb

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@adriangb

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  • I added a very descriptive title to this issue.
  • I used the GitHub search to find a similar issue and didn't find it.
  • I searched the SQLModel documentation, with the integrated search.
  • I already searched in Google "How to X in SQLModel" and didn't find any information.
  • I already read and followed all the tutorial in the docs and didn't find an answer.
  • I already checked if it is not related to SQLModel but to Pydantic.
  • I already checked if it is not related to SQLModel but to SQLAlchemy.

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Description

This is a continuation of a discussion on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tiangolo/status/1484092599166287874

I think the work in SQLModel is amazing, I can't even begin to comprehend how complex it is behind the scenes.
One thing I've been wondering about, not related to SQLModel in particular but rather to the general ecosystem of "models" in Python (classes with fields? not sure what the technical term is here. I'm referring to dataclasses, Pydantic, SQLAlchemy, Piccolo, etc.) is if we could use PEP 593's Annotated to increase composability between these libraries.

Most of these libraries use some sort of marker as a default value on fields to include metadata:

class Hero(SQLModel, table=True):
    id: Optional[int] = Field(default=None, primary_key=True)

I'm only using SQLModel as an example here, but Field could be Pydantic's Field, SQLAlchemy's Column, dataclasses' field, etc.

The issue here is that Field is only valid in the context ofSQLModel (or Pydantic or SQLAlchemy or whatever particular library). And it has to contain information for Pydantic (like JSON schema examples) as well as SQLAlchemy (primary keys, etc.).

Using Annotated this could look like:

class Hero(SQLModel, table=True):
    id: Annotated[Optional[int], Field(examples=....), Column(primary_key=True)] = None

In other words, you can have any number of markers you want, and the libraries that use these markers can just ignore markers they don't recognize.

Possibly even more difficult, if we could move away from base classes with meta classes that would improve composability even further. Think from pydantic import to_json; to_json(SomeModel) instead of having Pydantic create SomeModel.json. I think that's a totally different topic though.

I'm not sure if this solves any problems, but I thought it's an interesting idea worth sharing.

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