Serdar Tumgoren zstumgo...@gmail.com wrote
I'm working with a database of campaign finance filings, and I'm
trying to create a data structure that captures the fact that:
- there can be multiple races
- races can have multiple candidates
- candidates can have multiple campaign committees
- campaign committees can file multiple reports
Have you considered using classes? This looks like a fairly
natural fit for race, candidate, committee and maybe report
casses
I'm trying to pull these records from a database and output them to an
HTML file in sorted order.
Each class could have a render method that retuirns
an HTML fragment as a string...
Once I've created the data object, I'd like to group the output by
race, party, candidate, committee and filing, so that when I output in
my template, it appears like this:
You could provide support for a sort method that would
do the grouping for yopu...
I've been looking at Cookbook examples that rely on the setdefault
method to add key:value pairs to a dictionary, but I wasn't sure how
to implement that approach for a data structure with so many layers of
nesting.
One level at a time!
But with classes there would be less nesting and more relatinships
* Is the best approach to create some type of a Race class that can
store all these varying data points for each race?
I think you want a lot more than a Race class, see above.
* Should I be using some type of recursive function to handle all the
levels of nesting?
Probably not, a simple inter-bject relationship will make traversal
much easier
And of course, please let me know if there's a simpler approach I'm
overlooking that would meet my requirements.
I think creating more objects and getting each object to handle
fetching the stuff from its next level down would be simpler
HTH,
--
Alan Gauld
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.alan-g.me.uk/
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