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Once you have generated a select object, you can still add extra clauses to it. For example, if you wanted to add an ORDER_BY clause, you could write this:

s = select([page_table], and_(page_table.c.id<=10, page_table.c.name.like(u't%')))
s = s.order_by(page_table.c.title.desc(), page_table.c.id)

Tip

It is worth being aware that you can have SQLAlchemy automatically convert all string types to handle Unicode automatically if you set up the engine like this:

create_engine('sqlite:///:memory:', convert_unicode=True)

In this book, you will instead use the Unicode type explicitly when you want to work with Unicode strings, but some Pylons developers prefer to take this shortcut.

Now you can test the controller. In this case, once the form is submitted, the data is saved, and an HTTP redirect occurs so that the browser redirects to http://localhost:5000/formtest/result. If the user then refreshes the page, it simply redisplays the message rather than reperforming the action.

One issue with this approach is that if you want to display some of the submitted data, you will need to load it again in the result() action because the request that calls that action doesn’t contain any of the submitted data. In Chapter 8, I’ll cover how these sorts of messages can be displayed by storing information in a session store.

Create a new controller in your TemplateDemo project named greeting:

$ cd TemplateDemo
$ paster controller greeting