Define fields programmatically in Marshmallow Schema

Question

Say I have a Schema like this:

class MySchema(Schema):

    field_1 = Float()
    field_2 = Float()
    ...
    field_42 = Float()

Is there a w

Answer 1

The following method works for me.

I've demonstrated it using Marshmallow-SQLAlchemy because I'm not sure something like this is needed for plain Marshmallow anymore -- with version 3.0.0 it's pretty straightforward to programmatically create a schema using from_dict. But you could certainly use these concepts with plain Marshmallow.

Here, I use Marshmallow-SQLAlchemy to infer most of the schema, and then apply special treatment to a couple of the fields programmatically.

import enum

from marshmallow_enum import EnumField
from marshmallow_sqlalchemy import ModelSchema
from sqlalchemy import Column
from sqlalchemy import Enum
from sqlalchemy import Integer
from sqlalchemy import String
from sqlalchemy.ext.declarative import declarative_base


BaseResource = declarative_base()


class CustomEnum(enum.Enum):
    VALUE_1 = "the first value"
    VALUE_2 = "the second value"


class ExampleResource(BaseResource):
    __tablename__ = "example_resource"

    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    enum_field = Column(Enum(CustomEnum), nullable=False)
    title = Column(String)
    string_two = Column(String)

    def __init__(self, **kwargs):
        super(ExampleResource, self).__init__(**kwargs)


def generate_schema(class_, serialization_fields, serialization_fields_excluded):
    """A method for programmatically generating schema.

    Args:
        class_ (class): the class to generate the schema for
        serialization_fields (dict): key-value pairs with the field name and its Marshmallow `Field`
        serialization_fields_excluded (tuple): fields to exclude

    Returns:
        schema (marshmallow.schema.Schema): the generated schema

    """

    class MarshmallowBaseSchema(object):
        pass

    if serialization_fields is not None:
        for field, marshmallow_field in serialization_fields.items():
            setattr(MarshmallowBaseSchema, field, marshmallow_field)

    class MarshmallowSchema(MarshmallowBaseSchema, ModelSchema):
        class Meta:
            model = class_
            exclude = serialization_fields_excluded

    return MarshmallowSchema


generated_schema = generate_schema(
    class_=ExampleResource,
    # I'm using a special package to handle the field `enum_field`
    serialization_fields=dict(enum_field=EnumField(CustomEnum, by_value=True, required=True)),
    # I'm excluding the field `string_two`
    serialization_fields_excluded=("string_two",),
)

example_resource = ExampleResource(
    id=1,
    enum_field=CustomEnum.VALUE_2,
    title="A Title",
    string_two="This will be ignored."
)
print(generated_schema().dump(example_resource))
# {'title': 'A Title', 'id': 1, 'enum_field': 'the second value'}

It's necessary to define MarshmallowBaseSchema as a plain object, add all the fields, and then inherit from that class because the Marshmallow Schema initializes all the fields on init (in particular, _init_fields()), so this inheritance pattern makes sure all the fields are there at that time.