What if you have a 'Employees' class and you want to list all the
employees. Currenlty i'm seeing to possibilities:
- create a 'listAll' function inside the class which returns all the
employees in a array.
- create multiple instances, putting them in a array, by calling the
Employees class multiple times in a loop (thus not creating a listAll
function in the class).
What is the better way of doing this? And should a class always
reference only on 'item'?
Thank in advance.
It fully depends on what you want to do in your program. If you just
want to have a list of employees, a list or dict will suffice. If
you need a full-fledged employee database, an "Employees" class may
be a good API.
Regards,
Björn
--
BOFH excuse #83:
Support staff hung over, send aspirin and come back LATER.
It's a pure hypothetical question about where to put the function for
the list of employees when already having a Employee class.
Do I make it a method of the class, or do i create a instance of the
class for every employee (sitting inside a list)?
If you need a full-fledged employee database, a RDBMS may be a good API.
And if you insist on having it the OO way, have a look at SQLAlchemy.
My 2 cents...
The problem with "pure hypothetical" questions is that they usually have
no single good answer, and sometimes even no answer at all.
Now since you're talking database, the most common patterns seems to
have either some YourDomainClassNameHere methods to query instances, or
some module/singleton object providing such querying interfaces for the
whole app (or FWIW to provide both, the first calling on the second...).
> Do I make it a method of the class, or do i create a instance of the
> class for every employee (sitting inside a list)?
If you have an Employee class, I don't get how you would avoid creating
an instance for each and every, well, instance ? Unless you're thinking
about something like MS "recordsets" ? But then, you don't need any
domain class at all...
???
I'm afraid I didn't get this part of the question.
I'm sorry if my question wasn't clear enough. But I think it has been
answered.
Let me explain how I got to this question. I had written een Article
class which handled the articles that I had. On a certain page I
wanted to show all the articles. That got me wondering about what to
do. Should I make a method in my Article.class which returned multiple
articles, or should I just use my current Article.class and fill a
list (with a loop) with articles. The first solution thus meaning
writing another method, the latter method to just use the current
Article.class and call it multiple times.
The post of Dennis made me realize of another solution though. To
create another class called Articles which return multiple articles.
The only problem I forsee with this that's it's gonna be a very empty
class.
Thank you all for your response, it has pointed me in the right
direction.
> The post of Dennis made me realize of another solution though. To
> create another class called Articles which return multiple articles.
> The only problem I forsee with this that's it's gonna be a very empty
> class.
Then maybe it should not be a class. Maybe a function returning
`Article`\s would be enough. This is not Java, not everything has to be
stuffed into classes.
Ciao,
Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch
> Let me explain how I got to this question. I had written een Article
> class which handled the articles that I had. On a certain page I
> wanted to show all the articles. That got me wondering about what to
> do. Should I make a method in my Article.class which returned multiple
> articles, or should I just use my current Article.class and fill a
> list (with a loop) with articles. The first solution thus meaning
> writing another method, the latter method to just use the current
> Article.class and call it multiple times.
A class method would be ideal for this if you have no other reason to
create an Articles class:
@classmethod
def all(class_):
ret = []
for a in THE_ARTICLES:
article = class_(a)
ret.append(article)
return ret
Definitely don't use an instance method, which is expected to operate
on one article without making additional Article instances.
Mark 'Blackjack' Rintsch wrote:
> Then maybe it should not be a class. Maybe a function returning
> `Article`\s would be enough. This is not Java, not everything
> has to be stuffed into classes.
True, but this function is logically related to the Article class, so
it's convenient to put them together. Then the user can just "from __
import Article" rather than "from __ import Article, get_all_articles,
what_was_that_other_function?".