Your FleXML friend

We’ve opted to use XML to serialise (store) our data. This is well-supported in Python through the ElementTree module and means that we can store and manipulate the XML tree in memory, making for trivial loading and saving. If the program cared about human-readability, a calendar containing a single appointment would look like:

<calendar> <appt> <date> <year>2015</year> <month>0</month> <day>1</day> </date> <detail>Happy new year</detail> </appt> </calendar>

You’ll notice that the calendar widget is 0-indexed for the month, but nothing else. We admit this is a little strange but it’s easy to work around. Sadly, this program doesn’t care very much about readability, so everything’s stored on a single line. The XML tree object is stored in the variable self.root .

The loadFile() function attempts to load it from a file, but if this is not found an empty tree is created instead. We can then refer to the

saveAppt() to see how to create the required structure as follows:

def saveAppt(self, *args): … newAppt = ET.SubElement(self.root,‘appt’) newDate = ET.SubElement(newAppt, ‘date’) Year = ET.SubElement(newDate, ‘year’) Month = ET.SubElement(newDate, ‘month’) Day = ET.SubElement(newDate, ‘day’) Year.text = str(date[0]) Month.text = str(date[1]) Day.text = str(date[2]) newDetail = ET.SubElement(newAppt,‘detail’) newDetail.text = detail