I’ve seen two approaches which I’m going to post in the comments to see which one is considered best. Feel free to suggest others.
A context manager: Create a context manager that handles the connection and cursor creation, as well as closing the connection when done. This way, you can use the
with
statement to manage the connection and cursor in your functions.import sqlite3 DB_FILE = "your_database_file.db" class DatabaseConnection: def __enter__(self): self.conn = sqlite3.connect(DB_FILE) self.cursor = self.conn.cursor() return self.cursor def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb): self.conn.commit() self.cursor.close() self.conn.close() def insert_post_to_db(issue: Issue, lemmy_post_id: int) -> None: with DatabaseConnection() as cursor: cursor.execute( "INSERT INTO posts (issue_url, lemmy_post_id, issue_title, issue_body) VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?)", (issue.url, lemmy_post_id, issue.title, issue.formatted_body), )
This, but, with DatabaseConnection being a singleton, and preventing multiple enter clauses.
You can ensure it’s a singleton by modifying how a new object is built, by overriding the new dunder method. If an instance exists, return that, otherwise create a new one.
A function decorator: You can create a decorator that handles the connection and cursor creation and passes the cursor to the decorated function.
import sqlite3 from functools import wraps DB_FILE = "your_database_file.db" def with_cursor(func): @wraps(func) def wrapper(*args, **kwargs): conn = sqlite3.connect(DB_FILE) cursor = conn.cursor() result = func(cursor, *args, **kwargs) conn.commit() cursor.close() conn.close() return result return wrapper @with_cursor def insert_post_to_db(cursor: sqlite3.Cursor, issue: Issue, lemmy_post_id: int) -> None: cursor.execute( "INSERT INTO posts (issue_url, lemmy_post_id, issue_title, issue_body) VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?)", (issue.url, lemmy_post_id, issue.title, issue.formatted_body), )
Have you thought about using an ORM?
I’ve always liked SQL, so I avoided ORMs for a long time… They are great for so many reasons! I definitely recommend you ORMs, specially the ones that also help you with migrations.
Depends on the use case; the question is, do you need to construct and destroy the connection inside each method, or can you do it once, at the start of the program, and exit at the end?
db = Db(DB_FILE) post_id = insert_post(db,"hello") comment_id = insert_comment(db,post_id) db.close()