AttributeError while querying: Neither 'InstrumentedAttribute' object nor 'Comparator' has an attribute

This is because you are trying to access bar from the FooBar class rather than a FooBar instance. The FooBar class does not have any bar objects associated with it--bar is just an sqlalchemy InstrumentedAttribute. This is why you get the error:

AttributeError: Neither 'InstrumentedAttribute' object nor 'Comparator' object associated with FooBar.bar has an attribute 'foo'

You will get the same error by typing FooBar.bar.foo.name outside the sqlalchemy query.

The solution is to call the Foo class directly:

ses.query(FooBar).join(Bar).join(Foo).filter(Foo.name == "blah")

I cannot explain technically what happens but you can work around this problem by using:

ses.query(FooBar).join(Foobar.bar).join(Bar.foo).filter(Foo.name == "blah")

I was getting the same error Neither 'InstrumentedAttribute' object nor 'Comparator' has an attribute, but in my case, the problem was my model contained a Column named query, which was overwriting the internal property model.query.

I decided to rename that Column to query_text and that removed the error. Alternatively, passing the name= argument to the Column method would have worked: query = db.Column(db.TEXT, name='query_text').