Exercise 1: Basic Dashboard Prototype

Goal

Practice the smallest useful version of the Prototype pattern.

In this first part, a dashboard can clone itself and accept small changes.

You should be able to write:

uk_dashboard = template.clone(
    title="UK Sales Dashboard",
    owner="Alice",
)

The cloned dashboard should be a new object. The original dashboard should keep its original top-level values.

---

Story

Your analytics team has a standard dashboard template.

The template already has:

title
owner
layout
widgets
filters
refresh interval

For now, focus only on the basic idea:

Take this existing dashboard.
Make a copy.
Change a few fields on the copy.
Return the copy.

---

Your task

Open exercise1.py and implement:

def clone(self, **changes) -> "Dashboard":
    ...

The method should:

1. copy the current dashboard,
2. apply keyword changes using setattr,
3. return the cloned dashboard.

For this first exercise, the tests only check top-level fields.

---

Tests to satisfy

The tests check that:

• clone() returns a different Dashboard object,
• changed top-level fields appear on the clone,
• the original dashboard keeps its original top-level fields.

Run:

python exercise1.py

---

Hint

You may use copy.copy() or copy.deepcopy() here.

In the next exercise, you will see why shallow copying is not always enough.