Proposal: Use of dotmap or equivalent to simplify usage of the deserialized object

Because Marshmallow provides a nice abstraction over the datamodel, it might be nice to go even further and use something like DotMap (https://github.com/drgrib/dotmap) to simplify using the objects.

E.g. instead of

user['created_at']

you could type:

user.created_at

This also provides the benefit of giving you a layer to prevent messing with the object (instead of with a visible dict data structure, where it feels like it’s more open to interference).

[sloria]

Yes, a post_load method is a good place to do this. If you want to use DotMap as the dict class for both deserialization and serialization, you can override dict_class, like so:

from dotmap import DotMap
from marshmallow import Schema, fields


class MySchema(Schema):
    dict_class = DotMap

    foo = fields.Str()


schema = MySchema()
loaded = schema.load({"foo": "bar"})
print(loaded)
# DotMap(foo='bar')
dumped = schema.dump(loaded)
print(dumped)
# DotMap(foo='bar')

[deckar01]

Check out __getitem__.

https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html#object.__getitem__