dictviews methods not present on shelve objects

[MichaelCrouch]

BPO	26557
Nosy	@rhettinger, @serhiy-storchaka
Files	issue26557_shelve.patch issue26557_userdict.patch

^{Note: these values reflect the state of the issue at the time it was migrated and might not reflect the current state.}

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GitHub fields:

assignee = 'https://github.com/rhettinger'
closed_at = <Date 2016-09-12.03:38:47.017>
created_at = <Date 2016-03-14.11:19:00.538>
labels = ['easy', 'docs']
title = 'dictviews methods not present on shelve objects'
updated_at = <Date 2016-09-12.03:38:47.016>
user = 'https://bugs.python.org/MichaelCrouch'

bugs.python.org fields:

activity = <Date 2016-09-12.03:38:47.016>
actor = 'rhettinger'
assignee = 'rhettinger'
closed = True
closed_date = <Date 2016-09-12.03:38:47.017>
closer = 'rhettinger'
components = ['Documentation']
creation = <Date 2016-03-14.11:19:00.538>
creator = 'Michael Crouch'
dependencies = []
files = ['44578', '44580']
hgrepos = []
issue_num = 26557
keywords = ['patch', 'easy']
message_count = 6.0
messages = ['261744', '261745', '275918', '275920', '275921', '275941']
nosy_count = 6.0
nosy_names = ['rhettinger', 'docs@python', 'python-dev', 'serhiy.storchaka', 'thomir', 'Michael Crouch']
pr_nums = []
priority = 'low'
resolution = 'fixed'
stage = 'needs patch'
status = 'closed'
superseder = None
type = None
url = 'https://bugs.python.org/issue26557'
versions = ['Python 2.7']

[MichaelCrouch]

Shelve types in Python 2.7 don't implement the 'viewkeys', 'viewvalues', and 'viewitems' methods.

Section 11.4 of the Python Standard Library documentation says that "Shelf objects support all methods supported by dictionaries." If those methods can't be added to shelves, the documentation should be clarified.

The use case for this was that I wanted an iterator on a shelf that didn't try to materialize the entire list (since the shelf is very large and I'd prefer to leave most of it on disk).

[serhiy-storchaka]

The shelve object inherits its dict-like methods from UserDict.DictMixin. The documentation for UserDict.DictMixin should be updated too.

[thomir]

Attached is a patch that adds documentation to shelve.rst explicitly stating that it does not support the viewkeys, viewvalues, and viewitems methods.

I think this is the correct approach since it doesn't seems sensible to add support for these methods to UserDict, *and* also it might give users the impression that they can incrementally iterate over a shelved object without loading it all (which I believe is incorrect).

[rhettinger]

This patch looks fine.

[thomir]

Attached is a patch that adds a sentence to the UserDict module docs explicitly stating that the viewkeys, viewitems, and viewvalues functions are not implemented. I don't think it's worth adding support for these newer functions in UserDict. I'm unsure whether landing this patch is as necessary as the patch for the shelve module.

[python-dev]

New changeset 2b4bfef0d54a by Raymond Hettinger in branch '2.7':
Issue bpo-26557: Note that mapping view methods are not present in UserDict or shelves.
https://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/2b4bfef0d54a