Entities are akin to rows in a relational database

An entity storing the actual instance of data.

Each entity is officially represented with axref_Key, however it is possible thatyou might create an entity with only a partial key (that is, a keywith a kind, and possibly a parent, but without an ID). In such acase, the datastore service will automatically assign an ID to thepartial key.

Entities in this API act like dictionaries with extras built in thatallow you to delete or persist the data stored on the entity.

Entities are mutable and act like a subclass of a dictionary.This means you could take an existing entity and change the keyto duplicate the object.

Use xref_get to retrieve anexisting entity:

.. testsetup:: entity-ctor

import uuidfrom google.cloud importdatastoreunique = str(uuid.uuid4())[0:8]client =datastore.Client(namespace='ns{}'.format(unique))entity =datastore.Entity(client.key('EntityKind', 1234))entity['property'] = 'value'client.put(entity)

.. doctest:: entity-ctor

>>> key = client.key('EntityKind', 1234)>>> client.get(key)<Entity('EntityKind', 1234) {'property': 'value'}>

You can the set values on the entity just like you would on anyother dictionary.

.. doctest:: entity-ctor

>>> entity['age'] = 20>>> entity['name'] = 'JJ'

.. testcleanup:: entity-ctor

client.delete(entity.key)

However, not all types are allowed as a value for a Google Cloud Datastoreentity. The following basic types are supported by the API:

• datetime.datetime
• xref_Key
• bool
• float
• int (as well aslong in Python 2)
• unicode (calledstr in Python 3)
• bytes (calledstr in Python 2)
• xref_GeoPoint
• :data:None

In addition, three container types are supported:

• list
• xref_Entity
• dict (will just be treated like anEntity withouta key orexclude_from_indexes)

Each entry in a list must be one of the value types (basic orcontainer) and each value in anxref_Entity must as well. Inthis case an xref_Entityas acontainer acts as adict, but also has the special annotationsofkey andexclude_from_indexes.

And you can treat an entity like a regular Python dictionary:

.. testsetup:: entity-dict

from google.cloud importdatastoreentity =datastore.Entity()entity['age'] = 20entity['name'] = 'JJ'

.. doctest:: entity-dict

>>> sorted(entity.keys())['age', 'name']>>> sorted(entity.items())[('age', 20), ('name', 'JJ')]