Python design advice

Question

I have written a generic framework in python for some particular type of task. It is a webserver which serves different requests and operations. This framework can be used by many projects and each one has a different set of validation rules. Right now, I'm just updating my script for each project.

I'm thinking of externalizing this validation part, how do I go about this? The validations are more than mere field content validations; I'm thinking of having a config file which maps incoming request <-> validationModule something like /site1/a/b.xml=validateSite1.py and importing this module in an if condition if the request is for site1. So I'll have generic framework scripts + individual scripts for each site.

Is there a cleaner way to do this?

John Zwinck · Accepted Answer · 2013-07-23 14:37:57Z

I think it'd be better to use Python itself as the top-level mapping from URL paths to validation modules. A configuration might look like this:

import site1 import site2 def dispatch(uri): if uri.startswith('/site1/'): return site1.validate(uri) elif uri.startswith('/site2/): return site2.validate(uri)

This simple example might tempt you to "abstract" it out into a more "generic framework" that turns strings into filenames to use as validation scripts. Here are some advantages of the doing the above instead:

Performance: site modules are imported just once, we don't look up filenames per request.
Flexibility: if you decide later that the dispatching logic is more complicated, you can easily use arbitrary Python code to deal with it. There will never be a need to extend your mapping system itself--only the config files that require more complexity.
Single language.

Yes, this method has a lot of flexibility; only hitch I feel is that the number of import modules will keep on increasing, the imports need to be tracked, remove obsolete ones in the future etc

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