I have a bunch of classes from another library (the html helpers from
web2py). There are certain methods that I'd like to add to every one of
them. So I'd like to put those methods in a class, and pass the parent
at the time of instantiation. Web2py has a FORM class for instance.
I'd like to go:
my_element = html_factory(FORM)
Then my_element would be an instance of my class, and also a child of
FORM.
I cannot understand what you are actually trying to do here because you
aren't giving enough information and the description you give is
misleading. But from what little I can grasp, I think it sounds like an
unclean, confusing design and you would be better off with either mixins,
composition, or code injection.
What is html_factory? By the name, it should return some HTML. But you're
assigning the output to something called "my_element", which suggests it
is returning only a single element of HTML. To me, I would expect that to
be a string. Consequently, it isn't clear to me what you actually want,
and I'm forced to make some wild guesses, and I can see a number of
different alternative approaches.
=== Mixins ===
You state:
There are certain methods that I'd like to add to every
one of [my classes]. So I'd like to put those methods
in a class, and pass the parent at the time of instantiation
Don't pass the utility class at instantiation time. Use it as a mixin
class.
class UtilityMixin:
# add "those methods" to this class
pass
class MyClassA(MyParentClass, UtilityMixin):
pass
class MyClassB(AnotherClass, UtilityMixin):
pass
class MyClassC(MyClassB): # already inherits from UtilityMixin
pass
=== Composition ===
This frankly sounds like an abuse of inheritance. Inheritance is for
modelling "is-a" relationships, not just for sticking arbitrary lumps of
unrelated code together. If I can understand what you are trying to do,
then you need to model a "has-a" relationship. For example:
The Contact Us page is not a html form, it HAS a html form;
therefore the instance which creates the Contact Us page is not a html
form either, and should not inherit from FormClass;
but it should have a FormClass instance it can delegate the creation of
the form to.
Something like this, perhaps:
contact_page_designer = PageDesigner()
contact_page_designer.form_designer = FormClass()
This can be wrapped inside the __init__ method, of course. The FormClass
instance can be passed as a generic argument.
Then, your PageDesigner methods which need to create a form simply
delegate the work to the form_designer attribute. Instead of this:
self.make_form()
which depends on self having ten different methods to do with making
forms, you do this:
self.form_designer.make_form()
and all the form-related methods are encapsulated in one place, out of
the way. This general technique is known as composition, or delegation,
and you use it every time you do something like this:
result = self.name.upper() # delegating upper method to the string name
And yet, somehow people forget it in favour of inheritance once they move
beyond the primitive built-in types.
=== Code injection ===
You talk about deciding inheritance at instantiation time, which implies
that each instance will get different methods. If so, then so long as you
aren't changing dunder methods (double leading and trailing underscore
special methods like __init__ and friends), you can inject methods
directly onto an instance, either to add new functionality or override
existing functionality on a per-instance basis.
py> class Parrot:
.... def speak(self):
.... print "Polly wants a cracker!"
....
py> class KillBot:
.... def speak(self):
.... print "Crush! Kill! Destroy!"
....
py> p = Parrot()
py> p.speak()
Polly wants a cracker!
py> p.speak = KillBot().speak
py> p.speak()
Crush! Kill! Destroy!
=== Dynamic class creation ===
Forget about using type(), there's an easier way.
def factory(name, parent_class):
class MyClass(parent_class):
def method(self):
print "Called method"
return 42
MyClass.__name__ = name
return MyClass
Much easier than the equivalent using type.
def method(self):
print "Called method"
return 42
type(name, (parent_class,), {'method': method})
