Q:

Google App Engine - Datastore get_or_insert key_name confusion

I am confused by get_or_insert(..). What should I pass as the key_name? Consider the following example:
class Person(db.model)
    name = db.StringProperty(required=True)

Assume that no two people can have the same name. Say I want to get or insert a new Person with name Peter, what would my get_or_insert statement look like?
Cheers,
Pete

A:

The possibly confusing thing here is that the key doesn't show up directly in your model declaration, so that name = db.StringProperty bit in your example isn't needed. get_or_insert takes the keyname as its first (required) argument, so you're looking for code like:
person = Person.get_or_insert('Peter')
# other interesting & useful code here...
# later, maybe we need to retrieve that key name from the object:
name = person.key().name()
assert(name == "Peter")

