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💡 This Week’s Snack

The weekly tip/trick and coding challenge

One of the packages I’ve started learning for work is Cerberus. This package allows us to validate data easily by setting criteria for incoming/outbound data in a configurable-like manner.

For instance, if we wanted to store data into a Mongo database, we may want to validate the incoming document is formatted appropriately.

For instance, take the following document:

document = {
    'first_name' : 'John',
    'last_name' : 'Doe',
    'age' : 60
}

Suppose we impose the following criteria so that we ensure that the data that is written to the database is consistent every time:

• The first name must be a string and capitalized.

• The last name must be a string and capitalized.

• The age must be an integer and must be greater than or equal to 0.

Using Cerberus, we may define these “rules” as such:

schema = {
    'first_name': {
        'type': 'string',
        'coerce': lambda s: s.capitalize()
    },
    'last_name': {
        'type': 'string',
        'coerce': lambda s: s.capitalize()
    },
    'age': {
        'type': 'integer',
        'min': 0
    }
}

Each rule key (first_name, last_name, and age) are mapped to a value containing the validation rules for that key that we found in our document.

In this scenario:

• type → The data type of the field

• coerce → Apply a function to the field before validating

• min → The minimum number (inclusive) this field can be.

From here, we can pass this into a Cerberus validator object and have it return a boolean:

import cerberus

validator = cerberus.Validator(schema)
validated = validator.validate(document)

if validated:
    print("Data is successfully validated!")
else:
    print(validator.errors)

For this week’s challenge, see what other criteria you can add to the rules.

Try seeing if you can add in regex, minlength, maxlength and default. What about coerce for the age field? Hint: it’s not a lambda function 😉

Be sure to leverage the Cerberus documentation (specifically, the schema)!

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