Results return format

[MelindaShore]

Right now I'm thinking that an opaque results object (a PyCapsule) that either has the results in attributes or has methods to return the results (in both cases, a list of dicts). Don't have strong feelings either way.

[gmadkat]

I am working on the replies_tree and am thinking about how to present the results. What do you think of attributes when queries from Python, something like the following?
eg. replies_tree[0].answer.type returns 1 or replies_tree[0].answer.rdata.ipv4_address returns "10.1.2.3" etc?

To be honest I am not entirely sure how to do this in the Python to construct a PyObject in a PyCapsule that allows us to organize a list of PyObjects to return a list of replies with something like the above example, am investigating what options we have available to us.
Thoughts?

[MelindaShore]

What Paul described in the specification are basically JSON documents, and I think that while that format isn't a natural fit for C it is extremely Pythonic and something that we can use very effectively. I'd be inclined to continue to use dicts and lists for this, which would allow users to use Python programming constructs to manipulate the results for their own uses. So, the first question is how to access the contents, whether it should be

my_replies = getdns.general(context, name, ... )
my_replies_tree = my_replies.replies_tree()
foo = my_replies_tree[0]["answer"]["ipv4_address"]

OR

my_replies = getdns.general(context, name, ... )
foo = my_replies[replies_tree][0]["answer"]["ipv4_address"]

I think the first option is probably a little more efficient and the second one is a little more Pythonic.

PyCapsules are good for passing around opaque objects that you don't necessarily want the user to access directly, but only through setters and getters. It's probably a good way to encapsulate replies if we want to use methods to access the reply contents, but we should probably encode the replies directly as JSON documents if we're going to go with the second approach. Personally, I am leaning towards the second approach but don't feel very strongly either way.

[ngoyal]

While I haven't started the getdns for JS stuff, I was thinking the
response from general would just be a plain JS object. JS has the benefit
of being able to access properties of an object via foo.bar or foo['bar'].
I think it would be really easy for the developer to operate on the
response by doing something like:
my_replies.replies_tree[0].answer.ipv4_address. That is what I aim to do
within JS.

As a second observation, what if the developer could do my_replies =
context.general(name, ..) rather than my_replies = getdns.general(context)

• the first way feels more pythonic to me.

On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 4:44 PM, Melinda Shore notifications@github.comwrote:

What Paul described in the specification are basically JSON documents, and
I think that while that format isn't a natural fit for C it is extremely
Pythonic and something that we can use very effectively. I'd be inclined to
continue to use dicts and lists for this, which would allow users to use
Python programming constructs to manipulate the results for their own uses.
So, the first question is how to access the contents, whether it should be

my_replies = getdns.general(context, name, ... )
my_replies_tree = my_replies.replies_tree()
foo = my_replies_tree[0]["answer"]["ipv4_address"]

OR

my_replies = getdns.general(context, name, ... )
foo = my_replies[replies_tree][0]["answer"]["ipv4_address"]

I think the first option is probably a little more efficient and the
second one is a little more Pythonic.

PyCapsules are good for passing around opaque objects that you don't
necessarily want the user to access directly, but only through setters and
getters. It's probably a good way to encapsulate replies if we want to use
methods to access the reply contents, but we should probably encode the
replies directly as JSON documents if we're going to go with the second
approach. Personally, I am leaning towards the second approach but don't
feel very strongly either way.

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/7#issuecomment-35029765
.

[MelindaShore]

We're currently returning this as what's essentially a JSON document, as described in in the API. Let's review before closing