On 01/06/12 23:13, Tim Chase wrote:
On 06/01/12 15:05, Ethan Furman wrote:
MRAB wrote:
I'd probably think of a record as being more like a dict (or an
OrderedDict)
with the fields accessed by key:
record["name"]
but:
record.deleted
Record fields are accessible both by key and by attribute -- by key
primarily for those cases when the field name is in a variable:
for field in ('full_name','nick_name','pet_name'):
print record[field]
and since dbf record names cannot start with _ and are at most 10
characters long I've used longer than that method names... but if I want
to support dbf version 7 that won't work.
It seems to me that, since you provide both the indexing notation
and the dotted notation, just ensure that the methods such as
dbf.scatter_fields
*always* trump and refer to the method. This allows for convenience
of using the .field_name notation for the vast majority of cases,
but ensures that it's still possible for the user (of your API) to
use the indexing method to do things like
value = dbf["scatter_fields"]
if they have a thusly-named field name and want its value.
-tkc
I did think about *trumping* one way or the other, but both *ugh*.
Ethan:
I think offering both is over-complicating the design for no gain, and
possible complications later. For instance, what if you introduce a
method/property called "last" to get the last row of a table, it'll
cause some head-scratching as someone will suddenly have to make sure
your API changes didn't conflict with their column names (or if they've
used yours as a base and introduce methods, doesn't interfere with their
users of their version of the library...)
To most developers, I think blah["whatever"] is perfectly clear as
looking up a value via key is mostly done that way.
I suppose you could use __getitem__ to grab certain fields in one go (
as per your example - from any iterable that isn't a basestring? - and
users would probably enjoy not keep re-typing "record.xxx" and would
save you having to invent another possibly conflicting name) such as:
print record['full_name', 'nick_name', 'pet_name'] # looks clean to me
In short I totally agree with MRAB here.
Just my 2p,
Jon.
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