[Web-SIG] Form field dictionaries
David Fraser
davidf at sjsoft.com
Fri Oct 24 14:00:30 EDT 2003
Ian Bicking wrote:
> On Friday, October 24, 2003, at 11:28 AM, David Fraser wrote:
>
>> That's fine, but I think it's important that these methods are
>> available as an addition to a standard dictionary interface.
>> I think the key point is, if somebody wants a list of values, they
>> probably know that they want a list.
>> It's very difficult to write code by accident that would handle a
>> list of values as well as a string.
>> So if somebody knows they want a list in certain circumstances, they
>> could call getlist()
>> But I think the default dictionary return value should be the same as
>> getfirst().
>> That saves endless checks for lists for those who don't need them.
>
>
> Every time I have encountered an unexpected list it has been because
> of a bug somewhere else in my code. I might use a getone() method
> that threw some exception when a list was encountered, but I'd *never*
> want to use getfirst(). getfirst() is sloppy programming. (getlist()
> is perfectly fine though)
There seems to be a lot of agreement on this...
So let's take it that the interface will be a dictionary, with an extra
method defined, getlist, which will return multiple items if multiple
items were defined, or a list containing a single item otherwise.
The next question is, how do we handle the Get/Post/Both situation?
One way would be to have methods on the request object that return the
desired dictionary
Somebody also suggested including Cookies, as is done in PHP - I'm not
sure this is a good idea
David
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