lektor.db.Pad

• Template variable: site

The Pad is a helper class that provides basic access to querying the database. Inside templates an instance of it is available under the site variable automatically.

To understand what the pad does you need to consider what it is. The pad is similar to a connection in a regular database. Whenever you load a record it's temporarily cached on the pad. So unless you overflow the cache, loading the object a second time will most likely return an already loaded instance from the pad. This also means that the pad is not threadsafe. So if you want (for whatever reason) use multiple threads you have to create a separate pad for each thread.

This typically only comes up in the context of plugins or more complex command line scripts.

Template Usage

A ready-configured pad is always available under the site name which allows you to easily discover other pages. Here is a basic example of how to do this through the get method:

{% set root = site.get('/') %}
<title>{{ this.title }} | {{ root.title }}</title>

Plugin Usage

Within plugins it's typically not a good idea to construct a new Pad. Instead you can get access to the current pad from the active context:

from lektor.context import get_ctx

ctx = get_ctx()
if ctx is not None:
    pad = get_ctx().pad

Note that you can only get access to a pad if a context is available. This will not be the case when the plugin is currently being initialized for instance.

Manual Pad Creation

If you want to work with the database from a script, you can create a pad from the Environment with the help of the new_pad method:

from lektor.project import Project

project = Project.discover()
env = project.make_env()
pad = env.new_pad()
root_record = pad.root