nvelope

Define your JSON schema as Python dataclasses

It's kinda like Pydantic but better.

Now with JSON-schema generation!

Installation

pip install nvelope

The problem it solves

With nvelope you can define dataclasses which know how to convert themselves from/to JSON. All with custom checks and custom defined conversions from/to JSON for any type you want to put into your dataclass.

This library was designed with extensibility in mind, so it relies on interfaces (for the most part) rather than some weird inheritance stuff and other magic.

You can (and probably should) take a look at the code! The code base is microscopic compared to Pydantic.

Usage

Say you have a JSON representing a user in your app looking something like this

{
    "id": 530716139,
    "username": "johndoe",
    "language_code": "en"
}

You define an envelope for it

from dataclasses import dataclass

from nvelope import (Obj, int_conv, string_conv)

@dataclass      # note the @dataclass decorator, it is important
class User(Obj):
    _conversion = {
        "id": int_conv,
        "language_code": string_conv,
        "username": string_conv,
    }

    id: int
    language_code: str
    username: str

Now you have a model that knows how to read data from the JSON (not the raw string, actually, but to the types that are allowed by the standard json.dumps function e.g. dict, list, str, int, float, bool, None ) ...

user = User.from_json(
    {
        "id": 530716139,
        "username": "johndoe",
        "language_code": "en"
    }
)

... and knows how to convert itself into JSON

User(
    id=530716139,
    username="johndoe",
    language_code="en",
).as_json() 

# returns a dictionary {
#     "id": 530716139,
#     "username": "johndoe",
#     "language_code": "en"
# }

Compound envelopes

You can also define compound envelopes.

Say we want to define a message and include info about the sender. Having defined the User envelope, we can do it like this:

from nvelope import CompoundConv

@dataclass
class Message(Obj):
    _conversion = {
        "message_id": int_conv,
        "from_": CompoundConv(User),
        "text": string_conv,
    }

    from_: User
    text: str
    message_id: int

and use it the same way:

# reading an obj from parsed json like this

Message.from_json(
    {
        "message_id": 44,
        "text": "hello there",
        "from_": {
            "id": 530716139,
            "username": "johndoe",
            "language_code": "en"
        }
    }
)

# and dumping an object to json like this

import json

json.dumps(
    Message(
        message_id=44,
        text="whatever",
        from_=User(
            id=530716139,
            username="johndoe",
            language_code="en",
        )
    ).as_json()
)

Arrays

This is how you define arrays:

from nvelope import Arr, CompoundConv


class Users(Arr):
    conversion = CompoundConv(User)


# Same API inherited from nvelope.Compound interface

Users.from_json(
    [
        {
            "id": 530716139,
            "username": "johndoe",
            "language_code": "en",
        },
        {
            "id": 452341341,
            "username": "ivandrago",
            "language_code": "ru",
        }
    ]
)

Users(
    [
        User(
            id=530716139,
            username="johndoe",
            language_code="en",
        ),
        User(
            id=452341341,
            username="ivandrago",
            language_code="ru",
        ),
    ]
).as_json()

Field aliases

At some point you may need to define an envelope for an API containing certain field names which cannot be used in python since they are reserved keywords (such as def, from, etc.).

There's a solution for this:

from dataclasses import dataclass
from nvelope import Obj, string_conv, CompoundConv, AliasTable

@dataclass
class Comment(Obj):
    _conversion = {
        "text": string_conv,
        "from_": CompoundConv(User),
    }
    
    
    _alias_table = AliasTable({"from_": "from"})
            
    text: str
    from_: User

In this case from key gets replaced by from_ in the python model. The from_ field gets translated back to from when calling .as_json()

Missing and optional fields

There's a difference between fields that can be set to None and fields which may be missing in the JSON at all.

This is how you specify that a some field may be missing from the JSON and that's OK:

from dataclasses import dataclass
from typing import Optional

from nvelope import MaybeMissing, Obj, OptionalConv, AliasTable

@dataclass
class Comment(Obj):
    _alias_table = AliasTable(
        {"from_": "from"}
    )
    
    text: str
    img: Optional[str]          # this field can be set to None (null), but is must always be present in the JSON
    from_: MaybeMissing[User]   # this field can be missing from JSON body

    _conversion = {
        "text": string_conv,
        "img": OptionalConv(string_conv),   # note the wrapping with OptionalConv
        "from_": CompoundConv(User),
    }

This is how you check if the MaybeMissing field is actually missing

comment.from_.has()     # returns False if the field is missing

and this is how you get the value:

comment.value()     # raises an error if there's no value, 
                    # so it is recommended to check the output of .has()
                    #  before calling .value() 

Json-schema support

The Comment model from we have defined generates schema like this:

    Comment.schema()

with the returned schema looking like this:

{
    "type": "object",
    "properties": {
        "from": {
            "properties": {
                "id": {"type": "integer"},
                "language_code": {"type": "string"},
                "username": {"type": "string"},
            },
            "required": ["id", "language_code", "username"],
            "type": "object",
        },
        "img": {"type": ["string", "null"]},
        "text": {"type": "string"},
    },
    "required": ["text", "img"],
}

NOTE: nvelope does not perform json schema checks.

Custom conversions

You may define a custom conversions inheriting from nvelope.nvelope.Conversion abstract base class or using nvelope.nvelope.ConversionOf class.

For example, this is how datetime_iso_format_conv is defined:

from nvelope import WithTypeCheckOnDump, ConversionOf

datetime_iso_format_conv = WithTypeCheckOnDump(
    datetime.datetime,
    ConversionOf(
        to_json=lambda v: v.isoformat(),
        from_json=lambda s: datetime.datetime.fromisoformat(s),
    ),
)

Say we want to jsonify a datetime field as POSIX timestamp, instead of storing it in ISO string format.

datetime_timestamp_conv = ConversionOf(
    to_json=lambda v: v.timestamp(),
    from_json=lambda s: datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(s),
    schema={"type": "number"},
)

We could also add WithTypeCheckOnDump wrapper in order to add explicit check that the value passed into .from_json() is indeed float.

from nvelope import ConversionOf

datetime_timestamp_conv = WithTypeCheckOnDump(
    float,
    ConversionOf(
        to_json=lambda v: v.timestamp(),
        from_json=lambda s: datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(s),
        schema={"type": "number"},
    )
)

You may also go further and implement custom conversion. Inherit from nvelope.Conversion interface, implement its abstract methods, and you are good to go.

Custom compounds

You can also define custom alternatives to nvelope.Obj and nvelope.Arr. It will work fine as long as they inherit nvelope.Compound interface.

It currently required 3 methods:

• from_json
• as_json
• schema