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Serialize subsections as dictionaries

We are currently (de-)serialising (m_to_dict, m_from_dict) repeating sub-sections as lists. As lists are basically "integer keyed dicts", we could offer dicts as an alternative. This could be done transparently for deserialising and per flag on serialising.

Further, we have the concept of a "label_quantity" already. This is implemented very softly as a more quantity on sections. This is used by the archive browser in the UI to show values instead of numbers when presenting subsections.

Further, we added specialised deserialisation for schemas to support dicts for the quantities and sub_sections sub section of Section and section_definitions and category_definitions sub section of Package. Maybe there is more for attributes?

This is how this could get implemented more properly:

  • SubSection gets a new key_quantity: Quantity property that refers to a quantity in the SubSection's sub_section:Section. If the sub_section has a quantity with more.label_quantity, we use this as key_quantity for backwards compatibility.
  • When a sub section with key_quantity is set or deserialised, we check if the key quantity has unique values for all sub sections.
  • m_from_dict deals both with dicts or lists.
  • m_to_dict has three modes: always dict, always list, dict if key_quantity is set (default).
  • The UI deals with both lists and dicts. We remove the treatment of the old more.label_quantity.
  • We remove the specialised m_from_dict implementations on the schema classes Section, Package.

This could also be beneficial for the new graph API #1180 (closed) which uses dicts to realise a sub-section-like relationship between uploads->entries, users->uploads, etc.