Question

I’ve successfully written a Powershell script which:

• query AD to obtain the list of computer
• query every computer through WMI to obtain software/hardware information
• insert the collected data into a MySQL database.

The script works fine but I don’t like how it’s implemented. It’s procedural and there is a lot of code duplication, causing a mess everytime I need to change something.

Now, what I would like to ask you is: what is the cleanest way to implement it in python using OOP? I’ve thought something similar to this (pseudocode):

Class ADquery
    function get_computers( UO ): return a list of computers in the specified UO

Class Computer
    constructor( computername )
    function query(): connect to the computer and pull the info through WMI
    function print(): print the collected info to the console (debug)
    property RAM
    property CPU
    ...

Questions:

1. In order to save the collected data into a Database, do I have to create another object (e.g. Database) and pass the Computer object to him or add a member function to the Computer class (e.g. save_db() ) ?

2. If I go for the second option, that wouldn’t cause a massive number of MySQL connections when I’m dealing with multiple objects?

Thanks a lot and sorry for my bad English

Answer 1

That architecture looks reasonable to me.

1. You could do either, I’m not sure it really makes a huge difference with a small application like this.

2. Potentially. Depending on how it’s implemented you could get a lot of connections going on. If you’re doing a reasonable number of inserts I’d stick them in a list and insert all at once, if that’s possible with your code.