Reloading the database doesn't trigger reflection

[albireox]

For models that rely on reflection to populate fields, the expected behaviour is that when the database connects, the post_connect() hook will reload those models and the reflection will kick in. I'm fairly sure this was working before but doesn't seem to be the case anymore, maybe as a result of Peewee 4.

The consequence is that if one initially imports a model that relies on reflection when its bound database connection is not established, and the one does connect to the database, reflection won't work unless one explicitly does Model.reflect().

[albireox]

After looking at this a bit, maybe this is not a new issue and it's just a namespace caveat.

If one does

from sdssdb.peewee.sdss5db import catalogdb

catalogdb.database.connect(...)
catalogdb.Gaia_DR3.ra

everything works fine, but if one does

from sdssdb.peewee.sdss5db import catalogdb
from sdssdb.peewee.sdss5db.catalogdb import Gaia_DR3

catalogdb.database.connect(...)
Gaia_DR3.ra

then Gaia_DR3 doesn't have ra, which is a reflected field. The reason is that when one imports Gaia_DR3 directly, it becomes detached from the catalogdb namespace so reloading the module doesn't affect the model class (catalogdb.Gaia_DR3 is correctly reflected, but that is not the same object as Gaia_DR3).

So, the solutions are either to always import the module and not the model class, or explicitly call .reflect(). The latter is not recommended for uses that require many calls to .reflect() since each reflection takes a significant overhead.