Design

It’s important that engarde not get in your way. Your task is hard enough without a bunch of assertions cluttering up the logic of the code. And yet, it does help to explicitly state the assumptions fundamental to your analysis. Decorators provide a nice compromise.

Checks

Each checks takes a DataFrame, arguments necessary for the check, asserts the truth of the check, and returns the original DataFrame. If the assertion fails, an AssertionError is raised and engarde tries to print out some informative information about where the failure occurred.

The exceptions to the above rule are for generic assertions verify, verify_all, and verify_any. These take an additional argument, assertion_func, a function taking a DataFrame and returning some kind of booleans. You can think of any of the built-in checks, like none_missing as special cases of the generic verify functions where assertion_func has been fixed.

Decorators

Each check has an associated decorator. The decorator simply marshals arguments, allowing you to make your assertions outside the actual logic of your code. Personally, this is the most compelling use-case for engarde. You have a data source that pushes updates to a dataset. The updates are (or should be) similarly shaped. Perhaps you have some automated reporting derived from the dataset, and you wish to fail early if a crucial assumption is violated.