The answer gives you a bit more then asked
Fist of all it "extends" hstore to be able to store actually JSON, not just key-value So this structure is also OK:
{"key":{"inner_object_key":{"Another_key":"Done!","list":["no","problem"]}}}
So, first of all your ModelView should use custom converter
class ExtendedModelView(ModelView):
model_form_converter=CustomAdminConverter
Converter itself should know how to use hstore
dialect:
class CustomAdminConverter(AdminModelConverter):
@converts('sqlalchemy.dialects.postgresql.hstore.HSTORE')
def conv_HSTORE(self, field_args, **extra):
return DictToHstoreField(**field_args)
This one as you can see uses custom WTForms field which converts data in both directions:
class DictToHstoreField(TextAreaField):
def process_data(self, value):
if value is None:
value = {}
else:
for key,obj in value.iteritems():
if (obj.startswith("{") and obj.endswith("}")) or (obj.startswith("[") and obj.endswith("]")):
try:
value[key]=json.loads(obj)
except:
pass #
self.data=json.dumps(value)
def process_formdata(self, valuelist):
if valuelist:
self.data = json.loads(valuelist[0])
for key,obj in self.data.iteritems():
if isinstance(obj,dict) or isinstance(obj,list):
self.data[key]=json.dumps(obj)
if isinstance(obj,int):
self.data[key]=str(obj)
The final step will be to actual use this data in application
I did not make it in common nice way for SQLalchemy, since was used with flask-restful, so I have only adoption for flask-restful in one direction, but I think it's easy to get the idea from here and do the rest.
And if your case is simple key-value storage so nothing additionaly should be done, just use it as is. But if you want to unwrap JSON somewhere in code, it's simple like this whenever you use it, just wrap in function
if (value.startswith("{") and value.endswith("}")) or (value.startswith("[") and value.endswith("]")):
value=json.loads(value)
Creating dynamical field for actual nice non-JSON way for editing of data also possible by extending FormField
and adding some javascript for adding/removing fields, but this is whole different story, in my case I needed actual json storage, with blackjack and lists :)