more python SUDS advice

Everybody knows the a SOAP API is a horrid thing to work with, even a well designed one. But everybody also knows that SOAP is going to be around for a while.
Recently, while working with the ExactTarget SOAP API in Python, I figured out another helpful trick with SUDS, which is the main python SOAP wrapper.

Let me preface this by saying that suds is not a great library; particularly, it was written by and for people from another era of web development and does not stand up to today's needs. Why doesn't somebody write a better one? because everyone who does modern web dev hates SOAP in the first place.

But anyway, one annoying feature of suds is that when you create an object from its object factory, it always fills in all properties with an empty string, even those that are optional and have sane defaults. So essentially, it breaks all objects right out of the gate, forcing you to go through one by one and choose those sane defaults explicitly.

However, there's another way - for any properties that are giving you trouble in this fashion, just delete them after creating the object:
del object.AnnoyingProperty

Suds will then not send the property, allowing the API server to choose the sane default.

facepalms: 6

another python suds tip

If you are having trouble creating nested XML for array objects like this:

<configurations>
 <configuration>
   stuff
 </configuration>
</configurations>

while using suds' Factory methods, you should try to create the struct from scratch, by passing whatever method is appropriate a list of dictionaries or whatever nested structure applies:

[{'Configuration':obj},{'Configuration':obj}]

facepalms: a million

suds empty tag issue

I just posted a really nice Stack Overflow solution about this:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9388180/suds-generates-empty-elements-how-to-remove-them
The general point is that although Suds is an awesome python library that lets you connect to SOAP clients (I mean, really? welcome to the 21st century, people) with relative ease, it has the bad habit of adding empty tags for optional properties of objects. This tends to confuse (poorly written) API endpoints.

facepalms: 6