SQLAlchemy ordering by count on a many to many relationship

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I haven’t used SQLAlchemy much so I figured I’d give it a shot. I didn’t try to use your models, I just wrote some new ones (similar enough though):

likes = db.Table('likes',
    db.Column('user_id', db.Integer, db.ForeignKey('user.id')),
    db.Column('post_id', db.Integer, db.ForeignKey('post.id'))
)

class User(db.Model):
    id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
    username = db.Column(db.String(20))

    def __repr__(self):
        return "<User('%s')>" % self.username

class Post(db.Model):
    id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True)
    title = db.Column(db.String(255))

    likes = db.relationship('User', secondary = likes,
        backref = db.backref('posts', lazy='dynamic'))

    def __repr__(self):
        return "<Post('%s')>" % self.title

You want to join the likes table, use func.count to count likes, group_by Post and then use order_by:

db.session.query(Post, func.count(likes.c.user_id).label('total'))\
 .join(likes).group_by(Post).order_by('total DESC')

I found the ORM tutorial and the rest of the SQLAlchemy documentation very useful.

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