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I hope this is not a duplicate.

For some time now, I've been using a pattern which I think could be done more elegantly. I have a lot of XML files that need to be represented in a Django views. My current approach is like this:

I get a XML response from an API which gives me several documents.

First I define a mock class like this:

class MockDocument:
    pass

Then I write a XPath expression that gives me a list of the document nodes:

from lxml import etree   
with open("xmlapiresponse.xml", "r") as doc:
    xml_response = doc.read()   
tree = etree.fromstring(xml_response)                                                        
document_nodes = tree.xpath("//documents/item")

Now I iterate over the different documents and their fields using for nested-loops:

# list for storing the objects
document_objects = []
for document in document_nodes:
    # create a MockDocument for each item returned by the API
    document_object = MockDocument()    
    for field in document:
        # store the corresponding fields as object attributes
        if field.tag == "something":
            document.something = field.text
    document_objects.append(document)

Now I can pass the list of mock objects to a django view and represent them in the template in whichever way I want. Could this be done in a more simple fashion, though?

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1 Answer

up vote 2 down vote accepted

Using a generator function gives you some flexibility. You don't have to create a list.

def generate_documents( document_nodes ):

    for document in document_nodes:
        # create a MockDocument for each item returned by the API
        document_object = MockDocument()    
        for field in document:
            # store the corresponding fields as object attributes
            if field.tag == "something":
                document.something = field.text
        yield  document_object

You can do this of the list object is somehow important.

document_objects = list( generate_documents( document_nodes ) )

Or, more usefully, this

for d in generate_documents( document_nodes ):
    ... process the document ...

Which never actually creates a list object.

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thank you :) will to implement this existing code :) can't upvote atm, so I will accept the answer soon if no one else posts improvements. – Uku Loskit Jul 22 '11 at 15:33

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