Schinckel.net

Recently, I found myself having to interact with an API that uses SOAP. I’ve been using the SOAPpy package. Which has made it possible, but not exactly easy. But that’s not what I am going to write about right now.

In order to make the linking of data between my software and that system easier, I needed to get a dump of the other system’s data, in a CSV that I could send to the client.

So, since the SOAPpy module gives you something that looks dict-y, I thought I’d just be able to pass it to csv.DictWriter’s writerow() method.

Not quite.

See, whilst it supports the python dict-like [key] syntax, the SOAPpy.Types.structType doesn’t support the .get() method, that DictWriter uses to extract the data (indeed, it needs to, to be able to trap missing keys).

So, here is a simple duck-punch (does it quack like a duck? No? Punch it harder so, it quacks!) that enables you to pass a structType object to a DictWriter.writerow() method call:

from SOAPpy.Types import structType
structType.get = lambda x,y,z=None : x[y]

In this case, I was able to use this simple case, as I knew the keys it would be asked for would all exist, but you could make a slightly more complex one that checked to see the key exists, and if not, return z. You need all three arguments in the lambda though, since DictWriter passes them in.