I just started using SQLAlchemy and get a DetachedInstanceError and can't find much information on this anywhere. I am using the instance outside a session, so it is natural that SQLAlchemy is unable to load any relations if they are not already loaded, however, the attribute I am accessing is not a relation, in fact this object has no relations at all. I found solutions such as eager loading, but I can't apply to this because this is not a relation. I even tried "touching" this attribute before closing the session, but it still doesn't prevent the exception. What could be causing this exception for a non-relational property even after it has been successfully accessed once before? Any help in debugging this issue is appreciated. I will meanwhile try to get a reproducible stand-alone scenario and update here.

Update: This is the actual exception message with a few stacks:

  File "/home/hari/bin/lib/python2.6/site-packages/SQLAlchemy-0.6.1-py2.6.egg/sqlalchemy/orm/attributes.py", line 159, in __get__
    return self.impl.get(instance_state(instance), instance_dict(instance))
  File "/home/hari/bin/lib/python2.6/site-packages/SQLAlchemy-0.6.1-py2.6.egg/sqlalchemy/orm/attributes.py", line 377, in get
    value = callable_(passive=passive)
  File "/home/hari/bin/lib/python2.6/site-packages/SQLAlchemy-0.6.1-py2.6.egg/sqlalchemy/orm/state.py", line 280, in __call__
    self.manager.deferred_scalar_loader(self, toload)
  File "/home/hari/bin/lib/python2.6/site-packages/SQLAlchemy-0.6.1-py2.6.egg/sqlalchemy/orm/mapper.py", line 2323, in _load_scalar_attributes
    (state_str(state)))
DetachedInstanceError: Instance <ReportingJob at 0xa41cd8c> is not bound to a Session; attribute refresh operation cannot proceed

The partial model looks like this:

metadata = MetaData()
ModelBase = declarative_base(metadata=metadata)

class ReportingJob(ModelBase):
    __tablename__ = 'reporting_job'

    job_id         = Column(BigInteger, Sequence('job_id_sequence'), primary_key=True)
    client_id      = Column(BigInteger, nullable=True)

And the field client_id is what is causing this exception with a usage like the below:

Query:

    jobs = session \
            .query(ReportingJob) \
            .filter(ReportingJob.job_id == job_id) \
            .all()
    if jobs:
        # FIXME(Hari): Workaround for the attribute getting lazy-loaded.
        jobs[0].client_id
        return jobs[0]

This is what triggers the exception later out of the session scope:

        msg = msg + ", client_id: %s" % job.client_id