Flask-Admin view not showing backref column

Question

I have a Flask app which uses Flask-admin for a dashboard and raw model object manipulation. The app has a User class for users who sign into the site, and a Contact class for contacts entered by each user.

I want each row in the Contact tab in Flask-admin to display the email of the user who entered it. I have set up the code like this:

class User(UserMixin, db.Model):
    id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
    contacts = db.relationship('Contact', backref='user')
    # [...]

    def __repr__(self):
        return f'{self.email}'

class Contact(db.Model):
    id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
    user_id = db.Column(db.Integer, db.ForeignKey('user.id'))
    # [...]

The User column does not appear with this setup. I am not excluding it using column_exclude_list . I tried using column_list to explicitly show the 'user' column, and that DID show a column—but it was empty. (I will ultimately be using this, but I've turned it off for now to simplify things.)

Beyond implementing __repr__() and including a relationship with a backref linking the two model objects, what do I need to do to make this column appear? How can I debug why it's not showing up?

I did notice at one point that I had a second relationship declared with a backref also called 'user' on the Export class. Export.user was working! When I first noticed this, I disabled the second relationship, but that didn't fix the Contact.user relationship.

Answer 1

In the course of writing up this question, I worked out what was wrong. I had a function which I was using to fetch the Contacts entered by a given User. That function?

class User(UserMixin, db.Model):
    def contacts(self):
        return db.session.query(Contact).filter(Contact.user_id == current_user.id)

So the contacts function was conflicting with the contacts relationship static variable. Once I renamed the function, the column appeared as expected.