Item Loader Context

The Item Loader Context is a mechanism that allows to change the input/ouput processors behavior. It’s just a dict of arbitrary key/values which is shared among all processors. By default, the context contains the selector and any other keyword arguments sent to the Loaders’s __init__. The context can be passed when declaring, instantiating or using Item Loader.

For example, suppose you have a function parse_length which receives a text value and extracts a length from it:

def parse_length(text, loader_context):
    unit = loader_context.get('unit', 'm')
    # ... length parsing code goes here ...
    return parsed_length

By accepting a loader_context argument the function is explicitly telling the Item Loader that it’s able to receive an Item Loader context, so the Item Loader passes the currently active context when calling it, and the processor function (parse_length in this case) can thus use them.

There are several ways to modify Item Loader context values:

  1. By modifying the currently active Item Loader context (context attribute):

    loader = ItemLoader(product)
    loader.context['unit'] = 'cm'
    
  2. On Item Loader instantiation (the keyword arguments of Item Loader __init__ method are stored in the Item Loader context):

    loader = ItemLoader(product, unit='cm')
    
  3. On Item Loader declaration, for those input/output processors that support instantiating them with an Item Loader context. MapCompose is one of them:

    class ProductLoader(ItemLoader):
        length_out = MapCompose(parse_length, unit='cm')