Harry Marr

Integrating MongoDB and Django

Check out this great introduction to MongoEngine and Mumblr from Kevin Fricovsky.

Introducing MongoEngine

MongoEngine is a Document-Object Mapper (think ORM, but for document databases) for working with MongoDB from Python. It uses a simple declarative API, similar to that of the Django ORM.

So what does it do?

Here’s a brief run-down of some of the main features of MongoEngine:

• Document schema declaration and validation
• An elegant querying syntax, similar to that of Django
• Document inheritance, with support for “polymorphic querying”
• Aggregation methods, such as sum and average
• Advanced query condition combination using Q objects
• Session and authentication backends for Django

Show me the code!

To define a document, just inherit from the Document class and add some fields:

class BlogPost(Document):
    title = StringField(required=True)
    slug = StringField(required=True, max_length=250)
    content = StringField(required=True)
    date = DateTimeField(default=datetime.now, required=True)
    tags = ListField(StringField())

To save documents to the database, just instantiate a Document object, fill in the fields, and call save:

post = BlogPost(title='Introducing MongoEngine', slug='introducing-mongoengine')
post.content = 'MongoEngine is a Document-Object Mapper...'
post.tags = ['mongodb', 'mongoengine']
post.save()

To find documents, use the objects attribute of a Document subclass:

latest_posts = BlogPost.objects.order_by('-date')[:25]
mongodb_posts = BlogPost.objects(tags='mongodb')

How about a tag cloud? Simple:

# Get a dictionary with tags as the keys and frequencies as the values
tag_freqs = BlogPost.objects.item_frequencies('tag')

Every blog need comments, right?

class Comment(EmbeddedDocument):
    author = StringField()
    content = StringField(required=True)
    date = DateTimeField()

# Modify the previously defined BlogPost document
class BlogPost(Document):
    ...
    comments = ListField(EmbeddedDocumentField(Comment))
    ...

# Let's add a comment, this is performed as an atomic operation
comment = Comment(author=form['author'], content=form['content'])
BlogPost.objects(id=post_id).update(push__comments=comment)

I could go on, but I’ll keep this post short and to the point. For more information, see the documentation. The source is available on GitHub, fork it and have a play!