PyBites: Code Challenge 08 - House Inventory Tracker - review

It's end of the week again so we review the code challenge of this week . It's never late to join, just fork our challenges repo and start coding.

Learning Julian

The simplicity of this challenge is what made it fun for me. The challenge was in deciding how to store and manage the data in the most effective (and hopefully pythonic!) way.

I decided to go with multiple dicts: dicts for each room and then one main dict for the list of rooms.

Code wise, the challenge was to then properly list out the required keys and values of each dict when required. I did this using nested for loops in the print_contents() function.

I also added in a quick function to get the value of each room in total. It was satisfying seeing the result of sum(v.values()) appear! See output below:

$ python inventory_julian.py Study computer: $1200 lg flatron monitor: $300 samsung monitor: $500 desk: $400 guitar: $500 Living Room couch: $1000 tv: $3000 playstation: $500 speakers: $600 beanbag: $30 Master Bedroom bed: $400 mattress: $1000 chair: $180 drawers: $250 lamp: $20 Totals: Study: $2900 Living Room: $5130 Master Bedroom: $1850

Code here .

Bob

I had fun making an interactive version for this. This forced me to think about user input validation: name of item is required, value requires an int. There might be a bit repetition in resulting get_name and get_value , they both ask for user input, yet do different validations. Maybe something to wrap in a validation class ...

Nice constructs I could use: defaultdict, namedtuple and format printing.

Before I would have mixed calculation and printing, now I isolating the summing in calc_totals function which makes it a bit cleaner. See output below - I changed the NUM_ITEMS constant to 2 for shorter output (could make it a command line arg ...)

$ python inventory_bob.py Entering items for room study: * Item #1: - Enter the name of the item: monitor - Enter the value of the item: 200 * Item #2: - Enter the name of the item: laptop - Enter the value of the item: 1000 Entering items for room living_room: * Item #1: - Enter the name of the item: sofa - Enter the value of the item: 600 * Item #2: - Enter the name of the item: tv - Enter the value of the item: 500 Entering items for room master_bedroom: * Item #1: - Enter the name of the item: bed - Enter the value of the item: 1000 * Item #2: - Enter the name of the item: couch - Enter the value of the item: 400 * Room: study monitor : 200 laptop : 1000 -- Subtotal : 1200 * Room: living_room sofa : 600 tv : 500 -- Subtotal : 1100 * Room: master_bedroom bed : 1000 couch : 400 -- Subtotal : 1400 ---- Total : 3700

Code here .

Bonus: simple API

This was also a good occasion to make a simple API with Flask, which we practicedhere.

Feedback

What was your solution? Feel free to share in the comments below.

We hope you enjoy these challenges. Please provide us feedback if we can improve anything ...

If you have an interesting challenge you want us to feature, don't hesitate to reach out to us.

See you next week ...