[Pytables-users] Design questions

[Alvaro T. C. <al...@mi...>]

Hi,

There are two things about the design of the PyTables API that I don't
understand:

a) what is the reason to bind methods such as createTable & so on to
the File object instead of putting the respective functions on the
tables module?

rationale: tables.createTable(where*, ...) could do the same job,
where* being where prepended with file path or a group object.
                this frees the namespace so as to have
mytable.mydataset or mytable.mygroup free and not need to go through
root.


b) why is it necessary to explicitly dereference links via __call__?

rationale: if it would work like 'mount' then your applications do not
need to know whether a given dataset is local to the file or 'mounted'
through another file. As it is, the physical design of your database
escalates up to the application code, i.e. the latter depends on how
you arrange your tables in files.

derived question: what is the best way to achieve this transparency on
application code? e.g. is it a good idea to capture Exceptions such as
occur when indexing mytable.mylink[:] and try mytable.mylink()[:]
before really giving up?

Cheers,

-á.