Mailroom – metaprogramming it!
So far, your mailroom program may not have any way to save or re-load the donor data. Some of you may have added code to save and load the data in a text file or JSON, but even if you have, you might want a more flexible and extensible system once your data gets more complicated.
JSON
JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a format borrowed from the Web – Javascript being the de-facto scripting language in browsers. It is a great format for communicating with browsers, but it has become a common serialization format for many other uses: it is simple, flexible, and human-readable and writable.
It also maps pretty much directly to (some of) the core Python datatypes: lists, dictionaries, strings, and numbers.
So JSON is a nice way to save data for a program like mailroom.
Goal
Your goal is to use a JSON-save system started in the Metaprogramming Lesson (Metaprogramming) to make your model classes saveable and loadable as JSON.
You can download the package here:
And it may also be in your class repo solutions dir:
solutions/metaprogramming/json_save/
You can use either the decorator-based or meta-class based approach.
You may need to extend the JSON-save module a bit to make it work for you!
When you are done, your class that holds the database of donors and their data should have save and load methods that will, naturally, save and load the entire dataset.
Make Sure it’s Tested!