vobj 0.2.0

Versioned Objects

A versioned object is a specialized data container, capable of representing data when the schema for that data has gone through several different revisions. This is useful when loading data from a data store which may have older versions of the data, such as a file or a database.

To declare a versioned class, create a class extending VObject; then, declare one or more Schema classes within that class, i.e.:

class Employee(VObject):
    class Version1(Schema):
        __version__ = 1

        first = Attribute()
        last = Attribute()
        salary = Attribute(0, validate=int)

To create a new object of this class, simply pass keyword arguments to the constructor matching the attributes:

>>> worker = Employee(first='Kevin', last='Mitchell', salary=15)

The data is available as attributes of the object:

>>> worker.first
'Kevin'
>>> worker.salary
15

Eventually, you will discover changes that need to be made to this schema, such as the fact that some cultures do not use first or last names. To alter the schema for this, we’ll create a new “name” attribute and drop the “first” and “last” attributes. We also need an upgrader to convert values from the old schema to the new:

class Employee(VObject):
    class Version1(Schema):
        __version__ = 1

        first = Attribute()
        last = Attribute()
        salary = Attribute(0, validate=int)

    class Version2(Version1):
        # __version__ is automatically incremented here, but you
        # can set it explicitly

        name = Attribute()

        # salary is inherited, but so are first and last, so we
        # need to mask them...
        first = None
        last = None

        # And we need an upgrader...
        @upgrader
        def _upgrade_from_1(cls, state):
            state['name'] = '%s %s' % (state['first'], state['last'])
            del state['first']
            del state['last']
            return state

Versioned objects implement the pickle protocol, so that they can be pickled and unpickled. The pickle protocol implementation allows older versions of the object to be converted into the newer version. It is also possible to convert versioned objects directly to and from dictionaries, allowing any serialization mechanism to be used.