parse_generic method to allow parsing non Model types

Feature Request

I’m writting a middleware for aiohttp that uses pydantic (inspired by webargs that uses marshmallow), see

The development is still in the beggining

I would appreciate an additional helper functions for parsing types like:

• List[Model] # where model is a pydantic model
• Dict[int, List[Model]]

and several other derivations of generic types. Do you think make sense for pydantic scope, provides a function like:

def parse_object_into_generic(type: Union[GenericType, Type], object) -> Any:
    pass

[samuelcolvin]

Makes more sense, longer term I’m thinking about a pydantic decorator for validating types. The idea is you could use it in multiple scenarios:

• at an interface between different components to provide a hard check of types
• in development and testing to validate your code, then disable it to just a pass-through decorator in production

I’m not expecting to work on that in the immediate future. However it shouldn’t be very hard to build your own logic for this, take a look at how dataclasses are validation for inspiration:

https://github.com/samuelcolvin/pydantic/blob/cd50601172462b49cdf09e4d988906ba8f14af87/pydantic/dataclasses.py#L32-L34

[dnp1]

Agreed!

Thank you!