Oct 14 2009

Money database property for Google App Engine

Jonathan

Calculating money is a tricky thing. Your calculations have to be ultra-precise, so no storing things as floats where $1.33 might actually be stored as 1.3299999999. That is no good for calculations… But equally it is no good storing in cents either: what is 133c /2?

Python has a Decimal datatype, but this requires serialisation to String. Nick Johnson from the Google App Engine team wrote a post about how to write a Decimal property for Google App Engine. Unfortunately this because this serialises to String, then when you do any sorting, then you get String sorting: 100 comes before 11, which comes before 20. Bummer. I played around with storing numbers with a bunch of leading zeroes ie: 0000000010. But that starts to feel a bit hacky.

So I wrote a Money database property that has 6 places of precision, and works as a normal Python numeric type. I haven’t implemented all of those methods, just the ones that I needed. I would be happy to take feedback though.

To use:

class Transaction(db.model):
    dateOccurred = db.DateProperty(auto_now_add=True)
    description = db.StringProperty(required=True)
    amount = MoneyProperty(required=True)
 
t = Transaction(description="I got some money", amount=Money(10.34))
from google.appengine.ext import db
 
class Money(object):
	multiple = 1000000.0
	def __init__(self, val, multiply=True):
		if multiply:
			self._intVal = int(float(val) * self.multiple)
		else:
			self._intVal = int(val)
 
	def format(self, places=2):
		return "%.*f" % (places, float(self))
 
	def __float__(self):
		return self._intVal / self.multiple
 
	def __repr__(self):
		return "%.06f" % (self._intVal / self.multiple)
 
	def __mul__(self, other):
		if type(other) == Money:
 			return Money((self._intVal * other._intVal) / self.multiple, False)
		else:
			return Money(self._intVal * other, False)
 
	__rmul__ = __mul__
	def __add__(self, other):
		if type(other) == Money:
 			return Money(self._intVal + other._intVal, False)
		else:
			return Money(self._intVal + (other * self.multiple), False)
 
	__radd__ = __add__
 
	def __cmp__(self, other):
		if other == None:
			return 1
		elif other == "":
			return 1
		elif type(other) != Money:
			return self._intVal - other*self.multiple
		return self._intVal - other._intVal
 
	def __sub__(self, other): 
		return Money(self._intVal - other._intVal, False)
 
	def __rsub__(self, other): 
		return Money(other._intVal - self._intVal, False)
 
	def __div__(self, other): 
		if type(other) == Money:
			return Money((self._intVal * self.multiple) / other._intVal, False)
		else:
			return Money(self._intVal / other, False)
 
	def __rdiv__(self, other): 
		if type(other) == Money:
			return Money((other._intVal * self.multiple) / self._intVal, False)
		else:
			return Money((other * self.multiple * self.multiple) / self._intVal, False)
 
	def __neg__(self): 
		return Money(self._intVal * -1, False)
 
class MoneyProperty(db.Property):
    data_type = Money
 
    def get_value_for_datastore(self, model_instance):
    	value = super(MoneyProperty, self).get_value_for_datastore(model_instance)
    	if value==None:
    		return None
    	elif isinstance(value, Money):
    		return value._intVal
    	else:
    		return Money(value)._intVal
    def make_value_from_datastore(self, value):
    	if value==None:
    		return None
    	else:
    		return Money(value, False)
 
    def empty(self, value):
    	return value == None
 
	def get_value_for_form(self, instance):
		value = super(MoneyProperty, self).get_value_for_form(instance)
		if not value:
			return None
		if isinstance(value, Money):
			return float(value)
		return value
 
	def make_value_from_form(self, value):
		if not value:
			return []
		if isinstance(value, Money):
			return Money(value)
		return value

2 comments | posted in Development, google-app-engine, python