How to stop repeating myself

[Jacob Lyles]

Hello,

I'm building a small application using web.py with sqlAlchemy. My
application has users. When a user successfully authenticates, I store
his user ID in the session.user_id variable. Then I query the database
every time I want to render a template using the user's information.
However, this seems wasteful. I've already queried the DB once and
retrieved a "User" sqlalchemy object instance, is there any place I
can store this object without having to recreate it every time I GET a
new page? I tried storing this in a session.user_data variable, but
that caused errors.

Also, every time I query the database I am creating another sqlAlchemy
DB engine and another DB session. Is there a way to share a DB engine
across classes?

So, for instance, I have an URL called '/map' that is linked off the
home page. In the GET method of the MAP class, I am creating a new
sqlAlchemy engine, connecting to it to query for user data, doing the
same for other data, etc. It is the same for all my other URLs.


Thanks,
Jacob

[Dan Loewenherz]

You should consider using a fast key-value store to store pickled user information objects. Memcached for one has lots of python libraries. Query the store and do something like `user_info=pickle.loads(value)` whenever a page is loaded. That should be a lot quicker than instantiating an ORM each request.

-Dan