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# Under the hood

## Setting up the model

A lot of things happen under the hood when a model is defined using Elixir, and picked up by Camelot :

### Metadata

Each file that contains a part of the model definition should contain these lines :

They associate the Entities defined in this file with the default metadata. The metadata is a datastructure that contains information about the database in which the tables for the model will be created.

### Engine

The settings.py file should contain a function named ENGINE that returns a connection to the database. This connection will be associated with the default metadata used in the model definition.

As such, all defined models are associated with this database.

### Setup model

When the application starts up, the setup_model function in the settings.py file is called. In this function, all model files should be imported, to make sure the model has been completely setup.

## Working without the default model

Camelot comes with a default model for Persons, Organizations, History tracking, etc.

You might want to turn this off, here’s how to do so :

1. In your settings.py, remove the line ‘import camelot.model’ and the line ‘from camelot.model.authentication import updateLastLogin’, this will make sure no tables are created for the default Camelot model. Tables are only created for the models that have been imported before the call to ‘setup_all()’

2. Have a look in ‘camelot/model/__init__.py’ and copy the lines that do the initialization of the elixir session and metadata to the top of your own model file, imported first in the ‘setup_model()’ function.

    import elixir

    from sqlalchemy import MetaData

    from sqlalchemy.orm import scoped_session, create_session

    elixir.session = scoped_session( create_session )

    from camelot.core.conf import settings

    metadata = MetaData()

    __metadata__ = metadata

    __metadata__.bind = settings.ENGINE()
    __metadata__.autoflush = False
    __metadata__.transactional = False

## Using Camelot without the GUI

Often a Camelot application also has a non GUI part, like batch scripts, server side scripts, etc.

It is of course perfectly possible to reuse the whole model definition in those non GUI parts. The easiest way to do so is to leave the Camelot GUI application as it is and then in the non GUI script, initialize the model first

import settings settings.setup_model()

From that point, all model manipulations can be done. Access to the session can be obtained via any Entity subclass, such as Person

session = Person.query.session

After the manipulations to the model have been done, they can be flushed to the db

session.flush()

### Navigation

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- Creating models »

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