Type casting a base class to a derived one?

[Cliff Wells]

On Wed, 2007-01-24 at 11:37 -0800, Cliff Wells wrote:

> 
> class Person: # assume this is something from the ORM
>     name = "Kenny"
> 
> class PersonRow ( Person ):
>     pass
> 
> def flatten_person ( p ):
>     return "<span>omg, you've killed %p</span>" % p.name
> 
> def flatten_personrow ( p ):
>     return "<tr><td>%s</td></tr>" % p.name
> 
> register_flattener ( PersonRow, flatten_personrow )
> register_flattener ( Person, flatten_person )
> 
> 
> Now, assuming a list of Person records were passed in as 'persons', then
> in the template the template author could simply use:
> 
> div [
>     # show the first person
>     persons [ 0 ],
> 
>     # show a table of all persons
>     table [    
>         [ PersonRow ( p ) for p in persons ]
>     ]
> ]
> 

I should add that the reason I don't want to just say, call
flatten_personrecord() directly from the template (which would be a
reasonable solution in this example) is because I have a longer-term
goal that would require an object at that point.

What I expect I'll end up doing is using a factory function that returns
the desired object at that point, but it will require a bit more
explanation at the template level than I'd like:

table [
    [ render_as ( PersonRow, p ) for p in persons ]
]

or something similar.


Regards,
Cliff