Creating a dict from a table record

Anvil Q&A
1

Is there a convenient way to convert a record from a data table into a python dict?

I have a form which takes various user input fields, binds those to self.item and passes the result to a server module to update the data table with some validation on the way. So far, so good.

However, I’d like to initialise the form with the current record. I can extract the relevant record and hand crank it into the self.item dict by listing the fields, but it would be far nicer to do so directly.

2

Hi Owen,

Ah, yes. This is a slightly tricky corner. The short version is that you can call dict(row) on a data table row, and it will work…on the server. On the client, due to a corner case in the implementation of the Python-to-Javascript library we use, you have to use dict(list(row)) (else you’ll get a “cannot block or suspend here” error). This is…not ideal, and we do plan to fix this.

tl;dr dict(list(row)) (or just dict(row) on the server)

4 Likes
3

Aha! thank you!

I hit the ‘cannot block…’ error and gave up. I shall add the little necessary extra

4

So… when attempting to debug with

print repr(row)

we should use

print(dict(list(row)))

or

print(repr(dict(list(row))))

instead?