Upgrade Guide

This is an overview of things that changed as the cqlengine project was merged into cassandra-driver. While efforts were taken to preserve the API and most functionality exactly, conversion to this package will still require certain minimal updates (namely, imports).

THERE IS ONE FUNCTIONAL CHANGE, described in the first section below.

Functional Change

Legacy cqlengine included a workaround for a Cassandra bug in which prepended list segments were reversed (CASSANDRA-8733). As of this integration, this workaround is removed. The first released integrated version emits a warning when prepend is used. Subsequent versions will have this warning removed.

Remove cqlengine

To avoid confusion or mistakes using the legacy package in your application, it is prudent to remove the cqlengine package when upgrading to the integrated version.

The driver setup script will warn if the legacy package is detected during install, but it will not prevent side-by-side installation.

Organization

Imports

cqlengine is now integrated as a sub-package of the driver base package ‘cassandra’. Upgrading will require adjusting imports to cqlengine. For example:

from cqlengine import columns

is now:

from cassandra.cqlengine import columns

Package-Level Aliases

Legacy cqlengine defined a number of aliases at the package level, which became redundant when the package was integrated for a driver. These have been removed in favor of absolute imports, and referring to cannonical definitions. For example, cqlengine.ONE was an alias of cassandra.ConsistencyLevel.ONE. In the integrated package, only the cassandra.ConsistencyLevel remains.

Additionally, submodule aliases are removed from cqlengine in favor of absolute imports.

These aliases are removed, and not deprecated because they should be straightforward to iron out at module load time.

Exceptions

The legacy cqlengine.exceptions module had a number of Exception classes that were variously common to the package, or only used in specific modules. Common exceptions were relocated to cqlengine, and specialized exceptions were placed in the module that raises them. Below is a listing of updated locations:

Exception class	New module
CQLEngineException	cassandra.cqlengine
ModelException	cassandra.cqlengine.models
ValidationError	cassandra.cqlengine
UndefinedKeyspaceException	cassandra.cqlengine.connection
LWTException	cassandra.cqlengine.query
IfNotExistsWithCounterColumn	cassandra.cqlengine.query

UnicodeMixin Consolidation

class UnicodeMixin was defined in several cqlengine modules. This has been consolidated to a single definition in the cqlengine package init file. This is not technically part of the API, but noted here for completeness.

API Deprecations

This upgrade served as a good juncture to deprecate certain API features and invite users to upgrade to new ones. The first released version does not change functionality – only introduces deprecation warnings. Future releases will remove these features in favor of the alternatives.

Schema Management

cassandra.cqlengine.management.create_keyspace is deprecated. Instead, use the new replication-strategy-specific functions that accept explicit options for known strategies:

• create_keyspace_simple()
• create_keyspace_network_topology()

cassandra.cqlengine.management.delete_keyspace is deprecated in favor of a new function, drop_keyspace(). The intent is simply to make the function match the CQL verb it invokes.

Model Inheritance

The names for class attributes controlling model inheritance are changing. Changes are as follows:

• Replace ‘polymorphic_key’ in the base class Column definition with discriminator_column
• Replace the ‘__polymporphic_key__’ class attribute the derived classes with __discriminator_value__

The functionality is unchanged – the intent here is to make the names and language around these attributes more precise. For now, the old names are just deprecated, and the mapper will emit warnings if they are used. The old names will be removed in a future version.

The example below shows a simple translation:

Before:

class Pet(Model):
    __table_name__ = 'pet'
    owner_id = UUID(primary_key=True)
    pet_id = UUID(primary_key=True)
    pet_type = Text(polymorphic_key=True)
    name = Text()

class Cat(Pet):
    __polymorphic_key__ = 'cat'

class Dog(Pet):
    __polymorphic_key__ = 'dog'

After:

class Pet(models.Model):
    __table_name__ = 'pet'
    owner_id = UUID(primary_key=True)
    pet_id = UUID(primary_key=True)
    pet_type = Text(discriminator_column=True)
    name = Text()

class Cat(Pet):
    __discriminator_value__ = 'cat'

class Dog(Pet):
    __discriminator_value__ = 'dog'