Glossary

appstruct

A raw application data structure (a structure of complex Python objects), passed to the colander.SchemaNode.serialize() method for serialization. The colander.SchemaNode.deserialize() method accepts a cstruct and returns an appstruct.

cstruct

A data structure generated by the colander.SchemaNode.serialize() method, capable of being consumed by the colander.SchemaNode.deserialize() method.

schema

A nested collection of schema node objects representing an arrangement of data.

schema node

A schema node is an object which can serialize an appstruct to a cstruct and deserialize a appstruct from a cstruct an (object derived from colander.SchemaNode or one of the colander Schema classes).

type

An object representing a particular type of data (mapping, boolean, string, etc) capable of serializing an appstruct and of deserializing a cstruct. Colander has various built-in types (colander.String, colander.Mapping, etc) and may be extended with additional types (see Defining a New Type).

validator

A Colander validator callable. Accepts a node object and a value and either raises a colander.Invalid exception or returns None. Used as the validator= argument to a schema node, ensuring that the input meets the requirements of the schema. Built-in validators exist in Colander (e.g. colander.OneOf, colander.Range, etc), and new validators can be defined to extend Colander (see Defining a New Validator).