The boacontructor is a templating library for *data*.

It allows you to construct Python dictionaries from other templates,
dictionaries or instances.


Source code is available on github:
  * https://github.com/oisinmulvihill/boaconstructor


Documentation is available here:
  * http://packages.python.org/boaconstructor

An Example
----------

I'll let the code and comments do the talking::

    from boaconstructor import Template

    # Some shared information in a dict. This could also be a class instance
    # or something else that supports getattr and hasattr.
    #
    common = dict(
        timeout = 30,
        email = "admin@example.com"
    )

    # This is a template created in a module. You need one of these. I pass in
    # references that are available at this stage. The 'host.$.name' I will pass
    # in at render time.
    #
    webserver_data = Template('webserver',
        dict(
            interface = 'host.$.name',
            port = 32189,
            timeout = 'common.$.timeout',
            alert_email = 'common.$.email',
        ),
        # This is uses common as an 'internal' reference
        references={'common':common}
    )

    # At run time I can pass 'external' references to resolve the hostnames.
    # Maybe I got these from a database or some other source.
    #
    machine_1 = webserver_data.render({'host': {'name': 'myserver1'}}),
    # {'alert_email': 'admin@example.com', 'interface': 'myserver1', 'port': 32189, 'timeout': 30}

    machine_2 = webserver_data.render({'host': {'name': 'myserver2'}}),
    # {'alert_email': 'admin@example.com', 'interface': 'myserver2', 'port': 32189, 'timeout': 30}


    # Now I can pass these to Cheetah/Mako/etc to render a specific type of
    # XML/INI/Text configuration files.