Parse Nested Objects

[liblit]

Original title was "Canvas.get_assignment_group should turn assignments into Assignment instances"

A call to Course.get_assignment_group can optionally include full details about the assignments in the group. That is a nice way to reduce round-trips if we already know that the details will be needed.

In version 0.6.0 of canvasapi, these assignment details are provided as a list of dict.

group = course.get_assignment_group(group.id, include='assignments')
for assignment in group.assignments:
    print(assignment)  # prints each assignment as a dict

I was expecting them to be a list of Assignment instances. Each dict seemingly has all of the details needed to build an Assignment, and I can do that conversion myself:

group = course.get_assignment_group(group.id, include='assignments')
assignments = [Assignment(group._requester, raw) for raw in group.assignments]
for assignment in assignments:
    print(assignment)  # prints each assignment as an Assignment

However, accessing group._requester directly seems like cheating. And I would have expected canvasapi to take care of such details behind the scenes. Can that be done? Can Course.get_assignment_group convert each dict into a proper Assignment for me? (Obviously it should only do so if assignment details are present; without include='assignments', no details are given, so there is nothing to convert.

[liblit]

Still using canvasapi 0.6.0, calling Course.get_assignment_group with discussion_topic on the include[] list returns Assignment instances have discussion_topic attributes. The values of these attributes are simple Python dict instances but should be DiscussionTopic instances. So this is essentially the same problem, but in a new context. Should I file a new issue for this new context, or do you want to bundle that in with the issue I originally reported here?

[Thetwam]

I think bundling these issues together makes sense. This is essentially the issue for turning nested objects into actual objects instead of dict. I'll edit the title to reflect this.