OO question

[Paddy]

Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> On Sun, 31 Dec 2006 19:47:12 -0800, fejkadress wrote:
>
> > I want to make an addressbook and I'm new to OO programming, so I
> > wonder if this sounds reasonable.
> >
> > I think of making a class Address which contains all data about one
> > person, that class can have UserDict as baseclass so I can access data
> > like object['name'], etc..
>
> If you are using Python 2.2 or greater, you can inherit from dict:
>
>
> >>> class Address(dict):
> ...     pass
> ...
> >>> fred = Address({"address": "123 smith street"})
> >>> fred['address']
> '123 smith street'
>
>
> But ask yourself, what benefit do you gain by subclassing dict? Why not
> just use a dict?
>
> If this is a learning exercise, then sure, go for it, subclass away! But
> if this is meant to be real code, then consider what benefits and costs
> using OO will give you, compared to a function-based approach.
>
> (Please don't assume that this is a thinly veiled hint that OO is the
> wrong approach. It isn't.)
>
>
> > Then maybe I can have a class AddressBook which has a list that
> > contains all those Address objects.
> > Does that sound reasonable?
>
> Again, why create an AddressBook class? Why not just have a list of
> Addresses?
>
>
>
> > And then the real reason that I posted here is:
> > If I want to save all addresses to disk, I can have a method, say,
> > save() of AddressBook. But then what? What is a good object oriented
> > approach? Should each Address object take care of saving itself to the
> > file, with a method like writetofile(filename), or should the class
> > AddressBook take care of the saving and ask each object for its data?
>
>
>
> Here's one approach, assuming that AddressBook is merely a list of
> Addresses and that the Address class knows how to write to an open file
> object:
>
> def save(list_of_addresses, filename):
>     f = file(filename, "w")
>     for address in list_of_addresses:
>         address.save(f)
>     f.close()
>
> Here's a more pure OO approach to do the same thing:
>
> class AddressBook(object):
>     def __init__(self, list_of_addresses):
>         self.addresses = list_of_addresses
>
>     def save(self, filename):
>         f = file(filename, "w")
>         for address in self.addresses:
>             address.save(f)
>         f.close()
>
> Here's a third approach:
>
> class AddressBook(object):
>     def __init__(self, list_of_addresses):
>         self.addresses = list_of_addresses
>         self.currentfile = None
>
>     def save_one_address(self, data):
>         data = do_something_with(data)
>         self.currentfile.write(data)
>
>     def save(self, filename):
>         self.currentfile = file(filename, "w")
>         for address in self.addresses:
>             self.save_one_address(address.export())
>         self.currentfile.close()
>         self.currentfile = None
>
>
> --
> Steven.

Small addition.
If a class does a save then it should also do the load of the data too.