Table Reflection with the Inspector API

Normlite provides table reflection to let you inspect existing Notion databases and integrate them seamlessly into your application. Reflection allows you to discover table existence, column definitions, and to populate Table objects with their real schema — without writing low-level API code.

What is Table Reflection?

Table reflection is the process of reading a database schema from Notion and translating it into normlite objects such as:

• Table

• Column

• TypeEngine

Reflection is read-only and safe.

The Inspector API

from normlite import inspect

inspector = inspect(engine)

has_table(table_name)

if inspector.has_table("students"):
    print("Table exists")

get_columns(table_name)

columns = inspector.get_columns("students")
for col in columns:
    print(col.name, col.type)

Returns a sequence of ReflectedColumnInfo.

reflect_table(table)

from normlite import Table, MetaData

metadata = MetaData()
students = Table("students", metadata)
inspector.reflect_table(students)

After reflection, the table is ready for queries.

The Schema API

Table and MetaData provide a reflection API as well.

Table autoload_with

from  normlite import Table, MetaData

metadata = MetaData()
students = Table("students", metadata, autoload_with=engine)

Reflect all tables registered with MetaData

from  normlite import Table, MetaData

metadata = MetaData()
students = Table("students", metadata)
classes = Table("classes", metadata)
exams = Table("exams", metadata)
metadata.reflect(engine)

This API is very powerful because it enables to reflect all tables at once.