Finalizing the data structure

As Linus Torvalds, the developer of Linux, once said:

What he means is that well-designed data structures make the code very easy to design, maintain, and scale up. In contrast, if you start with a poor data structure, you can't make up for that, even with the best of code.

Start with a good data structure and your code will naturally be more simple, elegant, and easy to maintain.

With that in mind, let's try to decide on a suitable data structure for our program. Go back and take a look at the previous screenshot (under the Getting started section). What kind of data structure, do you think, would be needed to capture all the necessary fields of information?

Well, first of all our drum machine needs to keep information about beat patterns. So let's start by creating a list named all_patterns = [].

Now, each of the patterns within the list needs to capture information about the drum files related to the pattern: the number of units in the pattern, the BPU for the pattern, the BPM, and the buttons clicked to form the pattern.

Accordingly, we need to come up with a data structure where all_patterns is a list where each item represents a single pattern. Each pattern is then denoted by a dictionary, as follows:

{
 'list_of_drum_files': a list of location of audio drum files,
 'number_of_units': an integer, 'bpu': an integer,
 'beats_per_minute' : an integer,'button_clicked_list' : a 2
 dimensional list of boolean values where True means button is
 clicked and false means button is not clicked in the pattern
 }
 

It is very important that you get familiar with the preceding data structure definition for our drum machine. Notice that, with just this data in hand, we can define the logic to display everything that you see in the finalized drum machine.

Also notice that this data structure does not contain information about any GUI elements, such as widget information or widget states. As far as possible, we should always strive to cleanly separate the data of the backend (program logic) from the data related to the frontend (user interfaces). Our data structure here merely represents the backend but is sufficient enough to allow us to lay out the logic to determine our frontend.

We modify our code accordingly (see code 3.02.py) to initialize this data structure:

    def init_all_patterns(self):
        self.all_patterns = [
            {
                'list_of_drum_files': [None] * MAX_NUMBER_OF_DRUM_SAMPLES,
                'number_of_units': INITIAL_NUMBER_OF_UNITS,
                'bpu': INITIAL_BPU,
                'is_button_clicked_list':
                self.init_is_button_clicked_list(
                    MAX_NUMBER_OF_DRUM_SAMPLES,
                    INITIAL_NUMBER_OF_UNITS * INITIAL_BPU
                )
            }
            for k in range(MAX_NUMBER_OF_PATTERNS)]

We also initialize is_button_clicked_list with all values set to False, as follows:

    def init_is_button_clicked_list(self, num_of_rows, num_of_columns):
        return [[False] * num_of_columns for x in range(num_of_rows)]

To support this structure, we define a few constants (see code 3.02.py):

MAX_NUMBER_OF_PATTERNS = 10
MAX_NUMBER_OF_DRUM_SAMPLES = 5
INITIAL_NUMBER_OF_UNITS = 4
INITIAL_BPU = 4
INITIAL_BEATS_PER_MINUTE = 240

Now, if you run this program, you simply see a root window—nothing different from the previous code. But internally our code is reserving memory for all the data we will need to construct our logic. We have laid a strong foundation for our program to run. Believe it or not, we have done half the job.