How to decorate all functions of a class without typing it over and over for each method?

Question:

Lets say my class has many methods, and I want to apply my decorator on each one of them, later when I add new methods, I want the same decorator to be applied, but I dont want to write @mydecorator above the method declaration all the time?

If I look into __call__ is that the right way to go?

IMPORTANT: the example below appears to be solving a different problem than the original question asked about.

EDIT: Id like to show this way, which is a similar solution to my problem for anyobody finding this question later, using a mixin as mentioned in the comments.

class WrapinMixin(object):
    def __call__(self, hey, you, *args):
        print 'entering', hey, you, repr(args)
        try:
            ret = getattr(self, hey)(you, *args)
            return ret
        except:
            ret = str(e)
            raise
        finally:
            print 'leaving', hey, repr(ret)

Then you can in another

class Wrapmymethodsaround(WrapinMixin): 
    def __call__:
         return super(Wrapmymethodsaround, self).__call__(hey, you, *args)
Asked By: rapadura

||

Answers:

Decorate the class with a function that walks through the class’s attributes and decorates callables. This may be the wrong thing to do if you have class variables that may happen to be callable, and will also decorate nested classes (credits to Sven Marnach for pointing this out) but generally it’s a rather clean and simple solution. Example implementation (note that this will not exclude special methods (__init__ etc.), which may or may not be desired):

def for_all_methods(decorator):
    def decorate(cls):
        for attr in cls.__dict__: # there's propably a better way to do this
            if callable(getattr(cls, attr)):
                setattr(cls, attr, decorator(getattr(cls, attr)))
        return cls
    return decorate

Use like this:

@for_all_methods(mydecorator)
class C(object):
    def m1(self): pass
    def m2(self, x): pass
    ...

In Python 3.0 and 3.1, callable does not exist. It existed since forever in Python 2.x and is back in Python 3.2 as wrapper for isinstance(x, collections.Callable), so you can use that (or define your own callable replacement using this) in those versions.

Answered By: user395760

While I’m not fond of using magical approaches when an explicit approach would do, you can probably use a metaclass for this.

def myDecorator(fn):
    fn.foo = 'bar'
    return fn

class myMetaClass(type):
    def __new__(cls, name, bases, local):
        for attr in local:
            value = local[attr]
            if callable(value):
                local[attr] = myDecorator(value)
        return type.__new__(cls, name, bases, local)

class myClass(object):
    __metaclass__ = myMetaClass
    def baz(self):
        print self.baz.foo

and it works as though each callable in myClass had been decorated with myDecorator

>>> quux = myClass()
>>> quux.baz()
bar

You could generate a metaclass. This will not decorate inherited methods.

def decorating_meta(decorator):
    class DecoratingMetaclass(type):
        def __new__(self, class_name, bases, namespace):
            for key, value in list(namespace.items()):
                if callable(value):
                    namespace[key] = decorator(value)

            return type.__new__(self, class_name, bases, namespace)

    return DecoratingMetaclass

This will generate a metaclass decorating all methods with the specified function. You can use it in Python 2 or 3 by doing something like this

def doubling_decorator(f):
    def decorated(*a, **kw):
        return f(*a, **kw) * 2
    return decorated

class Foo(dict):
    __metaclass__ = decorating_meta(doubling_decorator)

    def lookup(self, key):
        return self[key]

d = Foo()
d["bar"] = 5
print(d.lookup("bar")) # prints 10
Answered By: Jeremy

Not to revive things from the dead, but I really liked delnan’s answer, but found it sllliigghhtttlllyy lacking.

def for_all_methods(exclude, decorator):
    def decorate(cls):
        for attr in cls.__dict__:
            if callable(getattr(cls, attr)) and attr not in exclude:
                setattr(cls, attr, decorator(getattr(cls, attr)))
        return cls
    return decorate

EDIT: fix indenting

So you can specify methods//attributes//stuff you don’t want decorated

Answered By: nickneedsaname

None of the above answers worked for me, since I wanted to also decorate the inherited methods, which was not accomplished by using __dict__, and I did not want to overcomplicate things with metaclasses. Lastly, I am fine with having a solution for Python 2, since I just have an immediate need to add some profiling code for measuring time used by all functions of a class.

import inspect
def for_all_methods(decorator):
    def decorate(cls):
        for name, fn in inspect.getmembers(cls, inspect.ismethod):
            setattr(cls, name, decorator(fn))
        return cls
    return decorate

Source (slightly different solution): https://stackoverflow.com/a/3467879/1243926
There you can also see how to change it for Python 3.

As comments to other answers suggest, consider using inspect.getmembers(cls, inspect.isroutine) instead. If you have found a proper solution that works for both Python 2 and Python 3 and decorates inherited methods, and can still be done in 7 lines, please, edit.

Answered By: Sergey Orshanskiy
Categories: questions Tags: , ,
Answers are sorted by their score. The answer accepted by the question owner as the best is marked with
at the top-right corner.