How can I achieve a self-referencing many-to-many relationship on the SQLAlchemy ORM back referencing to the same attribute?

Here’s the UNION approach I hinted at on the mailing list earlier today.

from sqlalchemy import Integer, Table, Column, ForeignKey, \
    create_engine, String, select
from sqlalchemy.orm import Session, relationship
from sqlalchemy.ext.declarative import declarative_base

Base= declarative_base()

friendship = Table(
    'friendships', Base.metadata,
    Column('friend_a_id', Integer, ForeignKey('users.id'), 
                                        primary_key=True),
    Column('friend_b_id', Integer, ForeignKey('users.id'), 
                                        primary_key=True)
)


class User(Base):
    __tablename__ = 'users'

    id = Column(Integer, primary_key=True)
    name = Column(String)

    # this relationship is used for persistence
    friends = relationship("User", secondary=friendship, 
                           primaryjoin=id==friendship.c.friend_a_id,
                           secondaryjoin=id==friendship.c.friend_b_id,
    )

    def __repr__(self):
        return "User(%r)" % self.name

# this relationship is viewonly and selects across the union of all
# friends
friendship_union = select([
                        friendship.c.friend_a_id, 
                        friendship.c.friend_b_id
                        ]).union(
                            select([
                                friendship.c.friend_b_id, 
                                friendship.c.friend_a_id]
                            )
                    ).alias()
User.all_friends = relationship('User',
                       secondary=friendship_union,
                       primaryjoin=User.id==friendship_union.c.friend_a_id,
                       secondaryjoin=User.id==friendship_union.c.friend_b_id,
                       viewonly=True) 

e = create_engine("sqlite://",echo=True)
Base.metadata.create_all(e)
s = Session(e)

u1, u2, u3, u4, u5 = User(name="u1"), User(name="u2"), \
                    User(name="u3"), User(name="u4"), User(name="u5")

u1.friends = [u2, u3]
u4.friends = [u2, u5]
u3.friends.append(u5)
s.add_all([u1, u2, u3, u4, u5])
s.commit()

print u2.all_friends
print u5.all_friends