Serializers

You can tell Betamax how you would like it to serialize the cassettes when saving them to a file. By default Betamax will serialize your cassettes to JSON. The only default serializer is the JSON serializer, but writing your own is very easy.

Creating Your Own Serializer

Betamax handles the structuring of the cassette and writing to a file, your serializer simply takes a dictionary and returns a string.

Every Serializer has to inherit from betamax.BaseSerializer and implement three methods:

• betamax.BaseSerializer.generate_cassette_name which is a static method. This will take the directory the user (you) wants to store the cassettes in and the name of the cassette and generate the file name.

• betamax.BaseSerializer.seralize() is a method that takes the dictionary and returns the dictionary serialized as a string

• betamax.BaseSerializer.deserialize() is a method that takes a string and returns the data serialized in it as a dictionary.

class betamax.BaseSerializer

Base Serializer class that provides an interface for other serializers.

Usage:

from betamax import Betamax, BaseSerializer


class MySerializer(BaseSerializer):
    name = 'my'

    @staticmethod
    def generate_cassette_name(cassette_library_dir, cassette_name):
        # Generate a string that will give the relative path of a
        # cassette

    def serialize(self, cassette_data):
        # Take a dictionary and convert it to whatever

    def deserialize(self, cassette_data):
        # Uses a cassette file to return a dictionary with the
        # cassette information

Betamax.register_serializer(MySerializer)

The last line is absolutely necessary.

deserialize(cassette_data)

A method that must be implemented by the Serializer author.

The return value is extremely important. If it is not empty, the dictionary returned must have the following structure:

{
    'http_interactions': [{
        # Interaction
    },
    {
        # Interaction
    }],
    'recorded_with': 'name of recorder'
}

Params str cassette_data

The data serialized as a string which needs to be deserialized.

Returns

dictionary

on_init()

Method to implement if you wish something to happen in __init__.

The return value is not checked and this is called at the end of __init__. It is meant to provide the matcher author a way to perform things during initialization of the instance that would otherwise require them to override BaseSerializer.__init__.

serialize(cassette_data)

A method that must be implemented by the Serializer author.

Parameters

cassette_data (dict) – A dictionary with two keys: http_interactions, recorded_with.

Returns

Serialized data as a string.

Here’s the default (JSON) serializer as an example:

from .base import BaseSerializer

import json
import os


class JSONSerializer(BaseSerializer):
    # Serializes and deserializes a cassette to JSON
    name = 'json'

    @staticmethod
    def generate_cassette_name(cassette_library_dir, cassette_name):
        return os.path.join(cassette_library_dir,
                            '{0}.{1}'.format(cassette_name, 'json'))

    def serialize(self, cassette_data):
        return json.dumps(cassette_data)

    def deserialize(self, cassette_data):
        try:
            deserialized_data = json.loads(cassette_data)
        except ValueError:
            deserialized_data = {}

        return deserialized_data

This is incredibly simple. We take advantage of the os.path to properly join the directory name and the file name. Betamax uses this method to find an existing cassette or create a new one.

Next we have the betamax.serializers.JSONSerializer.serialize() which takes the cassette dictionary and turns it into a string for us. Here we are just leveraging the json module and its ability to dump any valid dictionary to a string.

Finally, there is the betamax.serializers.JSONSerializer.deserialize() method which takes a string and turns it into the dictionary that betamax needs to function.