Learning Python

Chapter 10

1. Faking the Web. What you need to do is to create instances of a class that has the fieldnames attribute and appropriate instance variables. One possible solution is:

   class FormData:
       def __init__(self, dict):
           for k, v in dict.items():
               setattr(self, k, v)
   class FeedbackData(FormData):
       """ A FormData generated by the comment.html form. """
       fieldnames = ('name', 'address', 'email', 'type', 'text')
       def __repr__(self):
           return "%(type)s from %(name)s on %(time)s" % vars(self)
   
   fake_entries = [
       {'name': "John Doe",
        'address': '500 Main St., SF CA 94133',
        'email': '[e-mail]',
        'type': 'comment',
        'text': 'Great toothpaste!'},
       {'name': "Suzy Doe",
        'address': '500 Main St., SF CA 94133',
        'email': '[e-mail]',
        'type': 'complaint',
        'text': "It doesn't taste good when I kiss John!"},
       ]
   
   DIRECTORY = r'C:\complaintdir'
   if __name__ == '__main__':
       import tempfile, pickle, time
       tempfile.tempdir = DIRECTORY
       for fake_entry in fake_entries:
           data = FeedbackData(fake_entry)
           filename = tempfile.mktemp()
           data.time = time.asctime(time.localtime(time.time()))
           pickle.dump(data, open(filename, 'w'))

   As you can see, the only thing you really had to change was the way the constructor for FormData works, since it has to do the setting of attributes from a dictionary as opposed to a FieldStorage object.

2. Cleaning up. There are many ways to deal with this problem. One easy one is to modify the formletter.py program to keep a list of the filenames that it has already processed (in a pickled file, of course!). ...