title: translate SQL query to flask-sqlalchemy statements
body: <p>I am changing my old SQL implementations of a web app to flask-alchemy and having some difficulties about the correspondence.</p>
  
  <p>The old code looks like this. It does the name query about some properties and returns a csv style text. </p>
  
  <pre><code>header = 'id,display_name,city,state,latitude,longitude\n'
  base_query = '''SELECT id, bbs_id, city, state, 
                       latitude, longitude FROM mytable'''
  conn = sqlite3.connect(path.join(ROOT,'db.sqlite')) 
  c = conn.execute(base_query+'WHERE name=?', (name,))
  results = c.fetchall()
  conn.close()
  rows = [','.join(map(str, row)) for row in results]
  return header + rows
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The new code</p>
  
  <pre><code>header = 'id,display_name,city,state,latitude,longitude\n'
  cols = ['id', 'bbs_id', 'city', 'state', 'latitude', 'longitude'] 
  users = User.query.filter_by(name=name).all()
  rows = ''
  for user in users:
      rows += ','.join([user.id, user.bbs_id, user.city, user.state, user.latitude, user.longitude]) + '\n'
  return header + rows
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I am not happy with the new code since it's so verbose. </p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Is there a way to select only the ones in <code>cols</code> instead of query all columns and then pick the needed columns? </li>
  <li>If not, is it possible to write the <code>','.join()</code> more succinctly? It seems <code>user['id']</code> does not work and I have to do <code>user.id</code>.</li>
  </ul>