Robert Gravina <robert@gravina.com> writes:
Thanks, that is exactly what I am trying to do (return object remotely, edit it, re-use it in a subsequent call back to the server). What kind of comparison do you do then? Do you compare all attributes? By the way, what is an id() comparison? As far as I know Python compares to see if the instances (i.e. memory locations) are equal.
Precisely what comparison we do depends on the object in question. Yes, in many cases it's more or less a straight __dict__ comparison (sans the "_id" attribute), but in others there are only a few "identity" attributes that we consider important for comparison purposes, or that need special processing. Such as a username object equality test ignoring case of the username, or an object with date fields that might round trip through a database so we round to a precision that we consider equal. So for example, our Password object contains, for equality testing: def __hash__(self): return hash(self._lvalue) def __eq__(self,other): if isinstance(other,Password): return self._lvalue == other._lvalue elif isinstance(other,types.StringTypes): return self._lvalue == other.lower() else: return False def __ne__(self,other): return not self.__eq__(other) (_lvalue is an internally lowercased version of the current value) Note that we also chose to permit a direct string comparison with a password object, due to how it is often used to validate input, but most other objects can only compare equally to others of their type. A more blind __dict__ comparison (here for a FanClub object of ours) might go like: def __eq__(self,other): if isinstance(other,FanClub): d1 = self.__dict__.copy() d2 = other.__dict__.copy() try: del d1['_id'] except: pass try: del d2['_id'] except: pass return d1 == d2 else: raise NotImplementedError def __ne__(self,other): return not self.__eq__(other) In general, just implement the rules as appropriate for your object. Don't forget that if you are imposing rules on the equality - such as our case insensitive username object above - you want to match that with an appropriate __hash__ too, unless the object will never be used as a dictionary key.
As it turns out, we do also embed an "_id" attribute within the objects (an auto-generated UUID) so we can detect collisions (two clients attempting to modify the same object), but for general comparison purposes outside of that collision check, we exclude the _id attribute.
I've been looking around trying to find some good code for generating IDs, but most snippets I can find are accompanied by post after post on how that generation technique may fail under certain conditions.
I ran into a similar issue, and we ended up pretty much rolling our own that at least had our own acceptable conditions. It uses ctypes to wrap either the native Win32 call on Windows or libuuid on *nix (we've used it under FreeBSD and Linux). So it needs ctypes, and libuuid available for *nix. Note that the Win32 call pre-Win2K generates an address based UUID, while 2K+ defaults to random. We've used it for Python 2.2+. It falls back to an ASPN-based recipe worst case, but that generates UUIDs that aren't DCE conforming, so we warn to stderr in that scenario. I'll attach the generator class below if it helps. Since we wrote ours, there have been some other recent UUID generation efforts in Python (e.g., http://zesty.ca/python/uuid.py) that seem quite functional, but we didn't have incentive to move. In terms of synchronizing the re-transmitted copyable with an existing ZODB reference though, that still sounds like it may require some extra work or index keeping, unless you already have a way to locate the current internal copy of the object on the server side based on the copy supplied in the client request. Once you've got the server copy then the above discussion can be used to determine if a change has been made. -- David - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - class _UUIDGenerator(object): """Internal class used to contain state for UUID generation. Selects the appropriate platform specific approach to UUID generation, preferring to use appropriate external UUID routines if available, otherwise falling back to a non-standard internal mechanism. An instance of this class generates UUIDs by being called - returning the 16-byte buffer containing the UUID as raw data.""" def __init__(self): # We attempt to reference an appropriate platform routine for # UUID generation, and create a generation function to use it, # referencing that function as the "_generator" attribute of this # instance. If anything goes wrong during the process, we fall # back to a pure Python implementation try: import ctypes, struct if sys.platform == 'win32': uuidgen = ctypes.windll.rpcrt4.UuidCreate else: uuidgen = ctypes.cdll.LoadLibrary('libuuid.so').uuid_generate # Both of these platform functions fill in a 16-byte block, so # we create a single buffer to be used on each generation. Keep # in the instance so it will be available when accessed by the # generator function later. self.buffer = ctypes.c_buffer(16) # The generation function calls the platform routine to fill in # the buffer. In the Windows case, the buffer is structured as # separate fields (the UUID struct) in native byte order, so we # use struct to unpack/repack the fields into network order to # conform to the opaque buffer UUID will be expecting. def _generator(): uuidgen(self.buffer) if sys.platform == 'win32': return struct.pack('>LHH8s', *struct.unpack('LHH8s',self.buffer)) else: return self.buffer.raw except: # If we fallback to this method, generate a warning for now # (which will occur at import time) just as a head's up. sys.stderr.write('Warning: ' 'Falling back to internal UUID generation\n') def _generator(): # The following code was borrowed from ASPN, adjusted to not # use any additional option arguments. Note that this does # not generate UUIDs conforming to the DCE 1.1 specification. import time, random, md5 t = long( time.time() * 1000 ) r = long( random.random()*100000000000000000L ) try: a = socket.gethostbyname( socket.gethostname() ) except: # if we can't get a network address, just imagine one a = random.random()*100000000000000000L data = str(t)+' '+str(r)+' '+str(a) return md5.md5(data).digest() self._generator = _generator def __call__(self): """Return a buffer containing a newly generated UUID""" return self._generator()