Migrating to wwdtm

This section of the documentation covers the changes were made for wwdtm version 2. Those changes include a complete re-factor of the architecture for each module within the library.

Below are links to documents that cover changes made for each of the wwdtm modules:

• guest
• host
• location
• panelist
• scorekeeper
• show

Python Version

Python 3.8 or higher is now required for wwdtm due to dependent packages requiring Python 3.8 as the minimum version.

Development and testing of wwdtm version 2 is done using Python 3.8 and 3.10, with preliminary testing done on 3.11.

Handling Database Connections

In addition to the architectural changes that were made within each model, one of the bigger changes is that database connections are no longer passed into each function.

Instead, when you instantiate an instance of an object, you can either pass in a dictionary containing the database connection information that mysql.connector.connect will use create a database connection; or, you can pass in an existing mysql.connector.connect connection object.

The following example show either passing in a dictionary containing the required database connection information or an existing database connection:

from mysql.connector import connect
from wwdtm.show import Show

# Dictionary containing the required information for mysql.connector
connect_dict = {
    "database": {
        "host": "localhost",
        "user": "app",
        "password": "...",
        "database": "wwdtm"
    }
}

# Option 1:
# Passing in the database connection information dictionary
show = Show(connect_dict=connect_dict)

# Option 2:
# Passing in an existing database connection
database_connection = connect(**connect_dict)
guest = Guest(database_connection=database_connection)

The latter option may be useful if you are using connection pooling within your application and you’re just passing in a connection created from that connection pool.

Method Output Type Matches Type Hinting

With version 1 of wwdtm, if the requested data could not be retrieved from the database, most functions that would normally return a list or a dictionary would return None or False instead.

This behavior is changed in version 2 in which methods that have type hinting stating that a method returns a Dict will return an empty dictionary. Methods that have type hinting stating that the method returns a list will return an empty list.

Methods that are designed to return int or string will continue to return None if the requested data could not be retrieved.