Get last inserted value from MySQL using SQLAlchemy

I want to return the last inserted value for an auto_increment field in MySQL.

I have seen examples that mention the use of session.flush() to add the record and then retrieve the id. However that always seems to return 0.

I have also seen examples that mention the use of session.refresh() but that raises the following error:

InvalidRequestError: Could not refresh instance '<MyModel....>'

My code looks something like this:

class Foo(Base):
    __tablename__ = 'tblfoo'
    __table_args__ = {'mysql_engine':'InnoDB'}

    ModelID = Column(INTEGER(unsigned=True), default=0, primary_key=True, autoincrement=True)
    ModelName = Column(Unicode(255), nullable=True, index=True)
    ModelMemo = Column(Unicode(255), nullable=True)

f = Foo(ModelName='Bar', ModelMemo='Foo')
session.add(f)
session.flush()

At this point, the object f has been pushed to the DB, and has been automatically assigned a unique primary key id. However, I can't seem to find a way to obtain the value to use in some additional operations. I would like to do the following:

my_new_id = f.ModelID

I know I could simply execute another query to lookup the ModelID based on other parameters but I would prefer not to if at all possible.

Solution

The problem is you are setting defaul for the auto increment. So when it run the insert into query the log of server is

2011-12-21 13:44:26,561 INFO sqlalchemy.engine.base.Engine.0x...1150 INSERT INTO tblfoo (`ModelID`, `ModelName`, `ModelMemo`) VALUES (%s, %s, %s)
2011-12-21 13:44:26,561 INFO sqlalchemy.engine.base.Engine.0x...1150 (0, 'Bar', 'Foo')
ID : 0

So the output is 0 which is the default value and which is passed because you are setting default value for autoincrement column.

If I run same code without default then it give the correct output.

Please try this code

from sqlalchemy import create_engine
engine = create_engine('mysql://test:test@localhost/test1', echo=True)

from sqlalchemy.ext.declarative import declarative_base
Base = declarative_base()

from sqlalchemy.orm import sessionmaker
Session = sessionmaker(bind=engine)

session = Session()

from sqlalchemy import Column, Integer, Unicode

class Foo(Base):
    __tablename__ = 'tblfoo'
    __table_args__ = {'mysql_engine':'InnoDB'}

    ModelID = Column(Integer, primary_key=True, autoincrement=True)
    ModelName = Column(Unicode(255), nullable=True, index=True)
    ModelMemo = Column(Unicode(255), nullable=True)

Base.metadata.create_all(engine)

f = Foo(ModelName='Bar', ModelMemo='Foo')
session.add(f)
session.flush()

print "ID :", f.ModelID