[albatross-users] Albatross Form Question

[Michael C. Neel]

> There is also some mention of creating __setitem__ and __getitem__ methods
> for my customer object, to allow a more "loop" like approach to setting
> and getting.  Although I can see how these would work nicely if my
> customer data was stored in a dictionary, I don't see how to use them when
> my customer data is accessed via methods.
> 
> I'm afraid what I may have done is built a customer object that isn't as
> python friendly as it could be.  I really liked the idea of having a
> 'firstName' method that could retrieve, store, and run sanity checks but
> perhaps I need to work with the customer class in some other way?
> 
> Or perhaps I just need to come to terms with having a bulky
> CustomerController?

No, you have what you need, just not up on python enough yet (hint: read 
Dive into Python =).  Using hasattr, getattr, and setattr your 
controller wouldn't need to know anthing at all about the underling 
cusror object.  Using some calls to mysql for table info, and/or using 
c.description information you could preform basic checks on the data. 
You would still need to hook in complex checks such as is this a valid 
email, but it wouldn't be much.

You also have a dictionary of class members in vars(self) if that 
approach helps.  I'm assuming your using MySQLdb?  In which case you can 
  also use a DictCursor class/mixin if getting the result set back as a 
dict would help.

Your going down the right path I think.  If you get a solid Controller 
class, albatross has the tools to expose that Controller in the 
template, leaving your app logic to the app and not mundane 
get-validate-update.  Then agin, so much of what we do on the web is 
get-validate-update you may find yourself with nothing to do =p.

Mike