cyclic-classes 0.0.2

Allow creation of circular module dependencies between classes

Cyclic Classes

About

Ever had a situation when you wanted to create a cyclic reference between two objects, but don't want to maintain a large singular file? You're tired of seeing "cyclic-import" errors? This package is for you! Simply "register" a class you want to share between different modules and you're pretty much good to go!

See the documentation for more information.

Requirements

There's NONE!

Installation

Pull straight from this repo to install manually or just use pip: pip install cyclic-classes will do the trick.

Usage

Consider a package myk8s with two modules, maybe one is to reference a k8s deployment and the other one is for pods within that deployment.

deployment.py

from .pod import Pod

class Deployment:
    def __init__(self, name: str):
        self.name = name
    
    @property
    def pods(self):
        return [Pod(f"{self.name}-pod-{i}") for i in range(3)]

Now, if you want to create a back-reference for Deployment within Pod, like this: pod.py

from .deployment import Deployment

class Pod:
    def __init__(self, name: str):
        self.name = name
        
    @property
    def deployment(self):
        return Deployment(self.name.split("-")[0])

In the above example, you would get a cyclic-import error. To avoid this, you can use cyclic_classes to register the classes you want to share between modules. Do so like this:

deployment.py

from cyclic_classes import register, cyclic_import

with cyclic_import():  # This is required to avoid cyclic-import errors - you're actually importing a registered class underneath, but IDE will think it's your actual class
    from .pod import Pod

@register  # You have to register the class you want to access so that Pod will also be able to use it in the pod.py file
class Deployment:
    def __init__(self, name: str):
        self.name = name
    
    @property
    def pods(self):
        return [Pod(f"{self.name}-pod-{i}") for i in range(3)]

Now, if you want to create a back-reference for Deployment within Pod, like this: pod.py

from cyclic_classes import register, cyclic_import

with cyclic_import():
    from .deployment import Deployment

@register  # Making Pod available to cyclic_import
class Pod:
    def __init__(self, name: str):
        self.name = name
        
    @property
    def deployment(self):
        return Deployment(self.name.split("-")[0])

And that's it! You can now use the classes in your code without any issues.

Note

Cyclic import supports multiple ways of imports, including relative imports, absolute imports, and even module imports. As such, in the cyclic_import context you can use either of the following:

import myk8s.deployment as depl  # And later use depl.Deployment
from .deployment import Deployment
from myk8s.deployment import Deployment

# Not recommended, but also possible
# Reason: Such imports wouldn't work even if there was no cyclic import issue, but it works with cyclic import (you'll get a warning though) and some IDEs think it's correct 
from deployment import Deployment
import deployment

This also works with aliases! So feel free to use import ... as ... or from ... import ... as ... as you wish.

Development

Installation

Install virtual environment and cyclic_classes package in editable mode with dev dependencies.

python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .[dev]

How to?

Automate as much as we can, see configuration in pyproject.toml file to see what are the flags used.

staging format  # Reformat the code
staging lint    # Check for linting issues
staging test    # Run unit tests and coverage report