In the San Francisco Bay Area, you have to write a bunch of code to even apply for I.T. jobs. It doesn’t bother me because there is no time pressure and I usually get to work in a language I enjoy on jobs that have tidy solutions.

The annoying part is that your work just goes into the bit-bucket, even if (lucky you) you get the job. You can’t just publish your solution because then the company would have to come up with a new code challenge. But if you’re using the proper level of abstraction, you should be able to publish the reusable bits of your code without spoiling their code challenge.

So, here’s one of those.

MapStack is a python module which provides Stack, a MutableMapping which implements a sequential key search through a stack of other MutableMapping-style objects and a unionfs-like whiteout facility for terminating the key search early. One practical application is a dict with transaction layers.

A quick note about speed:

• Operations that are relatively fast: __getitem__(), __setitem__(), __delitem__(), __contains__(), append_layer(), pop_layer(), merge_layer()

• Operations that are relatively slow: keys(), fastkeys(), values(), items(), len(), flattened(),

The slower operations are slow because they often involve working with every layer of the stack, and sometimes every key/value pair of each layer.

MapStack is based on collections.MutableMapping, so it mostly acts like a dict. Here’s an example python session:

$ python
>>> import MapStack
>>> x=MapStack.Stack()
>>> x['type']='orange'
>>> x['color']='orange'
>>> x['peelcolor']='orange'
>>> x['what']='food'

So far, very dict-ish. Now we add a couple dict layers on top with append_layer.

>>> x.append_layer()
>>> x['type']='apple'
>>> x['color']='red'
>>> del x['peelcolor']
>>> x.append_layer()
>>> x['type']='avocado'
>>> x['color']='greenish'
>>> x['prep']='broil with soy sauce'
>>> x.items()
[('color', 'greenish'), ('type', 'avocado'), ('prep', 'broil with soy sauce'), ('what', 'food')]
>>> len(x)
4

Each layer’s keys show through, upper layers override lower layers if there are key collisions. Deletions persist upward. Let’s take a look at what’s going on.

>>> x
Stack([
{'color': 'orange', 'peelcolor': 'orange', 'type': 'orange', 'what': 'food'},
{'color': 'red', 'peelcolor': MapStack.Whiteout(), 'type': 'apple'},
{'color': 'greenish', 'type': 'avocado', 'prep': 'broil with soy sauce'}])
>>> x['peelcolor']
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<input>", line 1, in <module>
  File "MapStack.py", line 55, in __getitem__
    raise KeyError
KeyError

As you’d expect, the ‘peelcolor’ key doesn’t resolve. MapStack actually has a value associated with that key, but it’s an instance of a special MapStack.Whiteout class.

>>> x.pop_layer()
{'color': 'greenish', 'type': 'avocado', 'prep': 'broil with soy sauce'}
>>> x.items()
[('color', 'red'), ('type', 'apple')]
>>> x.pop_layer()
{'color': 'red', 'peelcolor': MapStack.Whiteout(), 'type': 'apple'}
>>> x.items()
[('color', 'orange'), ('peelcolor', 'orange'), ('type', 'orange'), ('what', 'food')]

The pop_layer method pops the layer stack. The other Stack methods flattened and merge_layer are similar; flattened returns an items()-like dict based on the current state of the stack, merge_layer merges the top layer with the one below it.