Typical Usage

For a comprehensive description of the interfaces for record types and records, please refer to the API documentation.

Type creation

To create a record type, just call Record.create_type() with the names of the field in your records. For example, to create a Person type with two fields (name and email address), you could do:

Person = Record.create_type("Person", "name", "email_address")

Note

Because of the way Python works, we cannot infer the name of the new record type by just looking at the name of the variable that will get the result of create_type(). Unfortunately, this means that you have to specify the record type name twice as in the example above.

To make some fields optional and give them default values, pass such values as keyword arguments:

Person = Record.create_type("Person", "name", "email_address", email_address=None)

Subtype creation

To extend a record type, you just need to specify the additional fields (if any) in a call to the extend_type() method of the type that you’re inheriting from; for example:

Student = Person.extend_type("Student", "courses_read", "graduation_date")

Fields in the subtypes can also have default values:

Student = Person.extend_type("Student", "courses_read", "graduation_date", graduation_date=None)

You can also further extend sub-types if you want to.

Initialization

Records are initialized by passing the field values in the constructor, which can be done by position and/or by name:

john_student = Student("John Smith", "jsmith@example.org", courses_read=["Calculus", "Economics"])

All the fields with no default values must be specified in the constructor, otherwise an exception will be raised.

Generalization

If Person is the super-type of Student, we can generalize a Student record to a Person record with init_from_specialization():

>>> jane_student = Student("Jane Doe", "jane.doe@example.org", ["Calculus", "OOP"])
>>> jane_person = Person.init_from_specialization(jane_student)
>>> jane_person
Person(name='Jane Doe', email_address='jane.doe@example.org')

Specialization

Likewise, if Student is a sub-type of Person, we can specialize a Person record to a Student record with init_from_generalization():

>>> jane_person = Person("Jane Doe", "jane.doe@example.org")
>>> jane_student = Student.init_from_generalization(jane_person, courses_read=["OOP"])
>>> jane_student
Student(name='Jane Doe', email_address='jane.doe@example.org', courses_read=['OOP'], graduation_date=None)

Note that to specialize a record you have to complement the generalization (jane_person in the example above) with values for all the additional fields defined in the sub-type.