Example of update_item in dynamodb boto3

Following the documentation, I'm trying to create an update statement that will update or add if not exists only one attribute in a dynamodb table.

I'm trying this

response = table.update_item(
    Key={'ReleaseNumber': '1.0.179'},
    UpdateExpression='SET',
    ConditionExpression='Attr(\'ReleaseNumber\').eq(\'1.0.179\')',
    ExpressionAttributeNames={'attr1': 'val1'},
    ExpressionAttributeValues={'val1': 'false'}
)

The error I'm getting is:

botocore.exceptions.ClientError: An error occurred (ValidationException) when calling the UpdateItem operation: ExpressionAttributeNames contains invalid key: Syntax error; key: "attr1"

If anyone has done anything similar to what I'm trying to achieve please share example.

Found working example here, very important to list as Keys all the indexes of the table, this will require additional query before update, but it works.

response = table.update_item(
    Key={
        'ReleaseNumber': releaseNumber,
        'Timestamp': result[0]['Timestamp']
    },
    UpdateExpression="set Sanity = :r",
    ExpressionAttributeValues={
        ':r': 'false',
    },
    ReturnValues="UPDATED_NEW"
)

Details on dynamodb updates using boto3 seem incredibly sparse online, so I'm hoping these alternative solutions are useful.

get / put

import boto3

table = boto3.resource('dynamodb').Table('my_table')

# get item
response = table.get_item(Key={'pkey': 'asdf12345'})
item = response['Item']

# update
item['status'] = 'complete'

# put (idempotent)
table.put_item(Item=item)

actual update

import boto3

table = boto3.resource('dynamodb').Table('my_table')

table.update_item(
    Key={'pkey': 'asdf12345'},
    AttributeUpdates={
        'status': 'complete',
    },
)

The original code example:

response = table.update_item(
    Key={'ReleaseNumber': '1.0.179'},
    UpdateExpression='SET',
    ConditionExpression='Attr(\'ReleaseNumber\').eq(\'1.0.179\')',
    ExpressionAttributeNames={'attr1': 'val1'},
    ExpressionAttributeValues={'val1': 'false'}
)

Fixed:

response = table.update_item(
    Key={'ReleaseNumber': '1.0.179'},
    UpdateExpression='SET #attr1 = :val1',
    ConditionExpression=Attr('ReleaseNumber').eq('1.0.179'),
    ExpressionAttributeNames={'#attr1': 'val1'},
    ExpressionAttributeValues={':val1': 'false'}
)

In the marked answer it was also revealed that there is a Range Key so that should also be included in the Key. The update_item method must seek to the exact record to be updated, there's no batch updates, and you can't update a range of values filtered to a condition to get to a single record. The ConditionExpression is there to be useful to make updates idempotent; i.e. don't update the value if it is already that value. It's not like a sql where clause.

Regarding the specific error seen.

ExpressionAttributeNames is a list of key placeholders for use in the UpdateExpression, useful if the key is a reserved word.

From the docs, "An expression attribute name must begin with a #, and be followed by one or more alphanumeric characters". The error is because the code hasn't used an ExpressionAttributeName that starts with a # and also not used it in the UpdateExpression.

ExpressionAttributeValues are placeholders for the values you want to update to, and they must start with :

If you don't want to check parameter by parameter for the update I wrote a cool function that would return the needed parameters to perform a update_item method using boto3.

def get_update_params(body):
    """Given a dictionary we generate an update expression and a dict of values
    to update a dynamodb table.
    
    Params:
        body (dict): Parameters to use for formatting.
    
    Returns:
        update expression, dict of values.
    """
    update_expression = ["set "]
    update_values = dict()
    
    for key, val in body.items():
        update_expression.append(f" {key} = :{key},")
        update_values[f":{key}"] = val
    
    return "".join(update_expression)[:-1], update_values

Here is a quick example:

def update(body):
    a, v = get_update_params(body)
    response = table.update_item(
        Key={'uuid':str(uuid)},
        UpdateExpression=a,
        ExpressionAttributeValues=dict(v)
        )
    return response

Based on the official example, here's a simple and complete solution which could be used to manually update (not something I would recommend) a table used by a terraform S3 backend.

Let's say this is the table data as shown by the AWS CLI:

$ aws dynamodb scan --table-name terraform_lock --region us-east-1
{
    "Items": [
        {
            "Digest": {
                "S": "2f58b12ae16dfb5b037560a217ebd752"
            },
            "LockID": {
                "S": "tf-aws.tfstate-md5"
            }
        }
    ],
    "Count": 1,
    "ScannedCount": 1,
    "ConsumedCapacity": null
}

You could update it to a new digest (say you rolled back the state) as follows:

import boto3

dynamodb = boto3.resource('dynamodb', 'us-east-1')


try:
    table = dynamodb.Table('terraform_lock')
    response = table.update_item(
        Key={
            "LockID": "tf-aws.tfstate-md5"
        },
        UpdateExpression="set Digest=:newDigest",
        ExpressionAttributeValues={
            ":newDigest": "50a488ee9bac09a50340c02b33beb24b"
        },
        ReturnValues="UPDATED_NEW"
    )
except Exception as msg:
    print(f"Oops, could not update: {msg}")

Note the : at the start of ":newDigest": "50a488ee9bac09a50340c02b33beb24b" they're easy to miss or forget.

An example to update any number of attributes given as a dict, and keep track of the number of updates. Works with reserved words (i.e name).

The following attribute names shouldn't be used as we will overwrite the value: _inc, _start.

from typing import Dict
from boto3 import Session


def getDynamoDBSession(region: str = "eu-west-1"):
    """Connect to DynamoDB resource from boto3."""
    return Session().resource("dynamodb", region_name=region)


DYNAMODB = getDynamoDBSession()


def updateItemAndCounter(db_table: str, item_key: Dict, attributes: Dict) -> Dict:
    """
    Update item or create new. If the item already exists, return the previous value and
    increase the counter: update_counter.
    """
    table = DYNAMODB.Table(db_table)

    # Init update-expression
    update_expression = "SET"

    # Build expression-attribute-names, expression-attribute-values, and the update-expression
    expression_attribute_names = {}
    expression_attribute_values = {}
    for key, value in attributes.items():
        update_expression += f' #{key} = :{key},'  # Notice the "#" to solve issue with reserved keywords
        expression_attribute_names[f'#{key}'] = key
        expression_attribute_values[f':{key}'] = value

    # Add counter start and increment attributes
    expression_attribute_values[':_start'] = 0
    expression_attribute_values[':_inc'] = 1

    # Finish update-expression with our counter
    update_expression += " update_counter = if_not_exists(update_counter, :_start) + :_inc"

    return table.update_item(
        Key=item_key,
        UpdateExpression=update_expression,
        ExpressionAttributeNames=expression_attribute_names,
        ExpressionAttributeValues=expression_attribute_values,
        ReturnValues="ALL_OLD"
    )

Hope it might be useful to someone!

using previous answer from eltbus , it worked for me , except for minor bug,

You have to delete the extra comma using update_expression[:-1]