"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/ _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
