Extend the user model

This guide shows how to extend and customize the user model of the framework. You can do this if you need to store more data about your users than just their Telegram ID and their admin status.

Prerequisites

• A Kamihi application
• Basic understanding of how SQLAlchemy works

Extending the User class

The base project defines a User class in kamihi/models/user.py that extends from kamihi.BaseUser. This class can be extended to add more attributes. For example, to add a name attribute, you can modify the file like this:

from kamihi.db import BaseUser
from sqlalchemy import String
from sqlalchemy.orm import Mapped, mapped_column

class User(BaseUser):
    __table_args__ = {'extend_existing': True}
    name: Mapped[str | None] = mapped_column(String(100), nullable=True)

Warning

Be sure to update the database schema when modifying the model. To obtain more information on how to do this, refer to the database migrations guide.

Adding users with extended attributes using the CLI

To add users with an extended User class, all the extra attributes need to be sent as a JSON string with the --data option:

> kamihi user add 123456789 --data '{"name": "John Doe"}'