sqlalchemy dynamic filtering

Your problem is that filter_by takes keyword arguments, but filter takes expressions. So expanding a dict for filter_by **mydict will work. With filter, you normally pass it one argument, which happens to be an expression. So when you expand your **filters dict to filter, you pass filter a bunch of keyword arguments that it doesn't understand.

If you want to build up a set of filters from a dict of stored filter args, you can use the generative nature of the query to keep applying filters. For example:

# assuming a model class, User, with attributes, name_last, name_first
my_filters = {'name_last':'Duncan', 'name_first':'Iain'}
query = session.query(User)
for attr,value in my_filters.iteritems():
    query = query.filter( getattr(User,attr)==value )
# now we can run the query
results = query.all()

The great thing about the above pattern is you can use it across multiple joined columns, you can construct 'ands' and 'ors' with and_ and or_, you can do <= or date comparisons, whatever. It's much more flexible than using filter_by with keywords. The only caveat is that for joins you have to be a bit careful you don't accidentally try to join a table twice, and you might have to specify the join condition for complex filtering. I use this in some very complex filtering over a pretty involved domain model and it works like a charm, I just keep a dict going of entities_joined to keep track of the joins.

I have a similar issue, tried to filter from a dictionary:

filters = {"field": "value"}

Wrong:

...query(MyModel).filter(**filters).all()

Good:

...query(MyModel).filter_by(**filters).all()