After some “miscommunications about coding standards”, Nicolas’s company decided that they should have one of their internal developers do code reviews on anything that came from their external, third-party developers. Nicolas drew the short straw on the most recent project.

The specific problem in play is that they had config-data, structured as nested dictionaries. You know the kind of data-structure- something like:

{
    database: {
        connString: "someDb:abc:123",
        pageSize: 50
    },
    api: {
        url: "https://foo/data",
        defaultHeaders: {
            "X-Api-Key": "d0908ad1-3e28-419f-ab05-0c74eae1ca37"
        }
    }
}

In their specific configuration, keys could be nested to any arbitrary depth. Someone wanted a helper method, that, given an array of keys: ["api", "defaultHeaders", "X-Api-Key"], could return the value associated with the key.

You might be thinking of some iterative or recursive approach for walking the tree, but a smart Python programmer knows that unrolling a loop boosts performance… right? Is that how it works? Well, no matter:

def getObjectValue( listObj):
    """ returns the value of the required object by construction the object from the list of string values """
    x = len(listObj)
    if x == 1:
        return config_data_list[listObj[0]]
    if x == 2:
        return config_data_list[listObj[0]][listObj[1]]
    if x == 3:
        return config_data_list[listObj[0]][listObj[1]][listObj[2]]
    if x == 4:
        return config_data_list[listObj[0]][listObj[1]][listObj[2]][listObj[3]]
    if x == 5:
        return config_data_list[listObj[0]][listObj[1]][listObj[2]][listObj[3]][listObj[4]]
    if x == 6:
        return config_data_list[listObj[0]][listObj[1]][listObj[2]][listObj[3]][listObj[4]][listObj[5]]
    if x == 7:
        return config_data_list[listObj[0]][listObj[1]][listObj[2]][listObj[3]][listObj[4]][listObj[5]][listObj[6]]

Good thing their config file doesn’t have 8 nested levels of configuration data. Then again, why does someone’s config data have 7 nested levels?

[Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!