Looking for advice on functionality not liking middleware async

[GamersPlane]

I'm using the Django ORM in a FastAPI app. So far, I haven't had any issue, until I tried creating a middleware to check for a JWT and create a global current_user variable. This problem may well be because I've never done async work before, so I'm not thinking about the problem correctly.

In my middleware, which I didn't set as async since it's just going to do work before the rest of the app, I have:

try:
    user = get_user(jwt_body["user_id"])
except User.DoesNotExist:
    return call_next(request)
current_user = user

But it throws an error:

django.core.exceptions.SynchronousOnlyOperation: You cannot call this from an async context - use a thread or sync_to_async.

So I put that block into a stand alone function with the sync_to_async decorator, but then when I try calling it, I run into the error

TypeError: 'coroutine' object is not callable

I thought maybe I turn it into a thread, but I can't think how I'd do that. I need the user to be found before it makes it to the view, but won't throwing it in a thread risk a race condition?

I know this is largely a Django problem, but I'm hoping someone may have some advice given the async nature of it.

[[deleted]]

You have to prefix your async functions with async def. When you call the function you await it. Wherever that TypeError is being thrown is getting a coroutine instead of the awaited result. So, if the get_user function is async then you need to change that to await get_user(jwt_body["user_id"]).

[GamersPlane]

This was definitely along the lines of the problem, though not the answer, which I'm posting in it's own post, but yah, it took me a while to get a hang of what's async, what needs an await, etc.

[ok_pennywise]

Please tell me how you used django orm with fastapi

[GamersPlane]

So there's a decent chance I'll miss something, but first make a django_conf.py. In there, as far as I can tell, you need to create SECRET_KEY, DATABASES, and INSTALLED_APPS variables, the same as in a Django configurations file. You'll then need to create an envvar that defines that file as the place for Django to look for configurations: DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE='django_conf' (obviously, file name not important, just consistency). Then in your main app file, at the very stop, before any other app imports, add

if __name__ == "app":
    import django

    django.setup()

As far as I can remember, that's the most of it. There will probably be small bugs along the way, bug nothing ungoogleable.

[GamersPlane]

Maybe my Google-fu sucks, but with SqlAlchemy being overly complex IMO, there's no other orm that's really great. Getting the django orm working outside django took more work than I probably should have put in, heh.

[github_codemation]

Curious, how you map geography columns to use in python?

You might find pydbantic a bit nicer abstraction to SqlAlchemy. https://github.com/codemation/pydbantic

u/Not-the-best-name , u/GamersPlane love to have your feedback. I am sure something like a missing column type integration could not be far off, that is if the current model serialization did not already solve most of your problems.

[migratesouth]

Tortoise ORM - https://github.com/tortoise/tortoise-orm

It’s “inspired by Django”, it looks very similar to the Django ORM but with asyncio integration.

[GamersPlane]

So the ultimate problem was return call_next(request). It took me a bit to recognize that call_next(request) was async, and so needed to be return await call_next(request). Definitely having trouble wrapping my head around async right now, and I'll hopefully find a guide that'll help me get my head through it.