Better way to iterate over python dataclass keys and values?

Question

I have two dataclasses, Route and Factors. Route contains a value and three copies of Factors.

Route does not know how many variables Factors contains. I want to get the name of these variables, and then get the respective value of each one, for each copy of Factors.

Here is what I currently have:

@dataclass
class Factors:
    do: bool  # does it do the route
    hub: int # how many of the locations are hubs

    def __init__(self, do_init):
        self.do = do_init
        self.hub = 0 # will add later 

    def __str__(self):
        return "%s" % self.do


@dataclass
class Route:
    route: tuple
    skyteam: Factors
    star: Factors
    oneworld: Factors

    def __init__(self, route):
        self.route = route.get('route')
        # this could probably be done with one line loop and a variable with names
        self.skyteam = Factors(route.get('skyteam'))
        self.star = Factors(route.get('star'))
        self.oneworld = Factors(route.get('oneworld'))

    def __str__(self):
        table = [[self.route, "SkyTeam", "StarAlliance", "OneWorld"]] # var name is fine
        for var in Factors.__dict__.get('__annotations__').keys():  # for each factor
            factor = [var]
            factor.append(self.skyteam.__dict__.get(var))
            factor.append(self.star.__dict__.get(var))
            factor.append(self.oneworld.__dict__.get(var))
            table.append(factor)
        return tabulate.tabulate(table, tablefmt='plain')

Input is

{'route': ('BOS', 'DXB'), 'skyteam': True, 'star': True, 'oneworld': True}

Current output is

('BOS', 'DXB')  SkyTeam  StarAlliance  OneWorld
do              True     True          True
hub             0        0             0

Maybe I could search Route for each variable that contains a Factors datatype and iterate over those?

Answer 1

You may use dataclass.fields

from dataclasses import dataclass, fields

for field in fields(YourDataclass):
    print(field.name, getattr(YourDataclass, field.name))

Answer 2

I'd also make use of the __dataclass_fields__ which returns a dict of the variable names and their types. For example something like:

for field in mydataclass.__dataclass_fields__:
    value = getattr(mydataclass, field)
    print(field, value)

Answer 3

I'd leave the builtin __str__s alone and just call the function visualize or something on the Route class, but that's taste. You also shouldn't overload the __init__ of a dataclass unless you absolutely have to, just splat your input dict into the default constructor.

Final nit, try to use getattr/setattr over accessing the __dict__, dataclasses are popular for using __slots__ to store their attributes, which would break your code in a non-trivial way.

So I'd go with something like this, using the tabulate library to handle the rendering:

from dataclasses import dataclass, fields
import tabulate

@dataclass
class Factor:
    do: bool
    hub: int = 0 # this is how to add a default value


@dataclass
class Route:
    route: tuple
    skyteam: Factor
    star: Factor
    oneworld: Factor

    def __post_init__(self):
        # turn Factor parameter dicts into Factor objects
        for field in fields(self):
            if issubclass(field.type, Factor):
                setattr(self, field.name, field.type(getattr(self, field.name)))

    def visualize(self):
        factors = {
            field.name: getattr(self, field.name)
            for field in fields(self)
            if issubclass(field.type, Factor)
        }
        rows = [[self.route, *factors]]  # header
        for field in fields(Factor):
            rows.append([field.name, *[getattr(f, field.name) for f in factors.values()]])
        print(tabulate.tabulate(rows))

Which works out fine for your example:

>>> r = Route(**{'route': ('BOS', 'DXB'), 'skyteam': True, 'star': True, 'oneworld': True})
>>> r.visualize()
--------------  -------  ----  --------
('BOS', 'DXB')  skyteam  star  oneworld
do              True     True  True
hub             0        0     0
--------------  -------  ----  --------

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This solution should continue to work both if you add more fields to the Factor class and more factor instances to the Route.