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POBest way to abstract season/show/episode data
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copied!<p>Basically, I've written an API to www.thetvdb.com in Python. The current code can be found <a href="http://github.com/dbr/tvdb_api/tree/master/tvdb_api.py" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>.</p> <p>It grabs data from the API as requested, and has to store the data somehow, and make it available by doing:</p> <pre><code>print tvdbinstance[1][23]['episodename'] # get the name of episode 23 of season 1 </code></pre> <p>What is the "best" way to abstract this data within the <code>Tvdb()</code> class?</p> <p>I originally used a extended <code>Dict()</code> that automatically created sub-dicts (so you could do <code>x[1][2][3][4] = "something"</code> without having to do <code>if x[1].has_key(2): x[1][2] = []</code> and so on)</p> <p>Then I just stored the data by doing <code>self.data[show_id][season_number][episode_number][attribute_name] = "something"</code></p> <p>This worked okay, but there was no easy way of checking if <code>x[3][24]</code> was supposed to exist or not (so I couldn't raise the season_not_found exception).</p> <p>Currently it's using four classes: <code>ShowContainer</code>, <code>Show</code>, <code>Season</code> and <code>Episode</code>. Each one is a very basic dict, which I can easily add extra functionality in (the <code>search()</code> function on <code>Show()</code> for example). Each has a <code>__setitem__</code>, <code>__getitem_</code> and <code>has_key</code>.</p> <p>This works mostly fine, I can check in Shows if it has that season in it's <code>self.data</code> dict, if not, <code>raise season_not_found</code>. I can also check in <code>Season()</code> if it has that episode and so on.</p> <p>The problem now is it's presenting itself as a dict, but doesn't have all the functionality, and because I'm overriding the <code>__getitem__</code> and <code>__setitem__</code> functions, it's easy to accidentally recursively call <code>__getitem__</code> (so I'm not sure if extending the <code>Dict</code> class will cause problems).</p> <p>The other slight problem is adding data into the dict is a lot more work than the old <code>Dict</code> method (which was <code>self.data[seas_no][ep_no]['attribute'] = 'something'</code>). See <code>_setItem</code> and <code>_setData</code>. It's not too bad, since it's currently only a read-only API interface (so the users of the API should only ever retrieve data, not add more), but it's hardly... Elegant.</p> <p>I think the series-of-classes system is probably the best way, but does anyone have a better idea for storing the data? And would extending the <code>ShowContainer</code>/etc classes with <code>Dict</code> cause problems?</p>

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