User Input Processing and Validation | Dataford Interview Questions

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Problem

The monday Work Management API receives a batch of user-submitted item updates. Write a function that validates and normalizes the batch efficiently while preserving the order of accepted updates.

An update is valid when it is a dictionary containing item_id, column, and value where:

item_id is a positive integer, but booleans are not accepted.
column is a string whose surrounding whitespace is removed, and whose normalized value appears in allowed_columns.
value is a string whose surrounding whitespace is removed, is not empty, and has at most 100 characters.
No two valid updates target the same (item_id, column) pair. If a duplicate occurs, reject the later update.

Return a dictionary with two fields: valid, containing normalized update dictionaries, and invalid_indices, containing the zero-based indices of every rejected update in input order. Invalid updates must not reserve their item-column pair.

Constraints

0 <= len(updates) <= 10^5
1 <= len(allowed_columns) <= 10^4
Each update must contain item_id, column, and value to be valid
item_id must be a positive integer and booleans are invalid
value must contain at most 100 characters after trimming
Duplicate pairs are determined using normalized column names

Function Signature

def validate_updates(updates, allowed_columns):