plugantic 0.1.1

Simplified extendable composition with pydantic

🧩 Plugantic - Simplified extendable composition with pydantic

🤔 Why use plugantic?

You may have learned that you should avoid inheritance in favor of composition. When using pydantic you can achieve that by using something like the following:

# Declare a base config
class OutputConfig(BaseModel):
    mode: str
    def print(self): ...

# Declare all implementations of the base config
class TextConfig(OutputConfig):
    mode: Literal["text"] = "text"
    text: str
    def print(self):
        print(self.text)

class NumberConfig(OutputConfig):
    mode: Literal["number"] = "number"
    number: float
    precision: int = 2
    def print(self):
        print(f"{self.number:.{self.precision}f}")

# Define a union type of all implementations
AllOutputConfigs = Annotated[Union[
    TextConfig,
    NumberConfig,
], Field(discriminator="mode")]

# Use the union type in your model
class CommonConfig(BaseModel):
    output: AllOutputConfigs

...

CommonConfig.model_validate({"output": {
    "mode": "text",
    "text": "Hello World"
}})

Whilst this works, there are multiple issues and annoyances with that approach:

• Hard to maintain: you need to declare a type union and update it with every change
• Not extensible: adding a different config afterwards would required to update the AllOutputConfigs type and all of the objects using it
• Redundant definition of the discriminator field (i.e. Literal[<x>] = <x>)

This library solves all of these issues (and more), so you can just write

from plugantic import PluginModel

class OutputConfig(PluginModel):
    mode: str
    def print(self): ...

class TextConfig(OutputConfig):
    # No redundant "text" definition here!
    mode: Literal["text"]
    text: str
    def print(self):
        print(self.text)

class NumberConfig(OutputConfig):
    # No redundant definition here either!
    mode: Literal["number"]
    number: float
    precision: int = 2
    def print(self):
        print(f"{self.number:.{self.precision}f}")

# No need to define a union type or a discriminator field!
# You can just use the base type as a field type!
class CommonConfig(BaseModel):
    output: OutputConfig

# You can even add new configs after the fact!
class BytesConfig(OutputConfig):
    mode: Literal["bytes"]
    content: bytes
    def print(self):
        print(self.content.decode("utf-8"))

...

# The actual type is only evaluated when it is actually needed!
CommonConfig.model_validate({"output": {
    "mode": "text",
    "text": "Hello World"
}})

✨ Features

🌀 Automatic Downcasts

Let's say you have the following logger:

FeatureNewPage = Literal["newline"]

class LoggerBase(PluginModel):
    def log_line(self, line: str, new_page: bool=False): ...

class LoggerStdout(LoggerBase, value="stdout"):
    new_page_token: str|None = None
    def log_line(self, line: str, new_page: bool=False):
        if new_page:
            if not self.new_page_token:
                raise ValueError("new_page_token is not set")
            print(self.new_page_token)
        print(line)

class Component1(BaseModel):
    logger: LoggerBase

class Component2(BaseModel):
    logger: LoggerBase[FeatureNewPage]

then users could not use Component2 with LoggerStdout as it does not support the FeatureNewPage feature, even thoudh LoggerStdout would support it, if new_page_token: str was enforced.

Conventionally, this would require the developer to create two classes (i.e. LoggerStdout and LoggerStdoutNewPage) and then include either one in the final annotated union depending on if the component requires the new page functionality.

With plugantic, you can automatically create subtypes that are more strict than the base type and they will be automatically validated and downcast when using the model:

def ensure_new_page_feature(handler: PluginDowncastHandler):
    handler.enable_feature(FeatureNewPage)
    handler.set_field_annotation("new_page_token", str)
    handler.remove_field_default("new_page_token")

class LoggerBase(PluginModel, value="stdout", auto_downcasts=(ensure_new_page_feature,)):
    new_page_token: str|None = None
    def log_line(self, line: str, new_page: bool=False):
        if new_page:
            if not self.new_page_token:
                raise ValueError("new_page_token is not set")
            print(self.new_page_token)
        print(line)

By declaring multiple callbacks in auto_downcasts, you can create a superset of all possible downcasts and plugantic will automatically select the least strict depending on which features you require.

🔌 Extensibility

You can add new plugins after the fact!

To do so, you will have to ensure one of the following prerequisites:

1. Use ForwardRefs

from __future__ import annotations # either by importing annotations from the __future__ package

class BaseConfig(PluginModel):
    ...

...

class CommonConfig1(BaseModel):
    config: BaseConfig

class CommonConfig2(BaseModel):
    config: "BaseConfig" # or by using a string as the type annotation


class NumberConfig(BaseConfig): # now you can declare new types after the fact (but before using/validating the models)!
    ...

2. Enable defer_build

class BaseConfig(PluginModel):
    ...

class CommonConfig(BaseModel):
    config: BaseConfig

    model_config = {"defer_build": True}

📝 Type Checker Friendliness

The type checker can infer the type of the plugin model, so you don't need to define a union type or a discriminator field! Everything except for the annotated union is based on pydantic and as such can be used like before as type checkers are already familiar with pydantic.

🏛️ Leading Principles

Composition over Inheritance

Composition is preferred over inheritance.

Dont repeat yourself (DRY)

Having to inherit from a base class just to then declare an annotated union or having to declare a discriminator field both as an annotation and with a default being the same as the annotation is a violation of the DRY principle. This library tackles all of these issues at once.

Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you accept

Using automatic downcasts, this library allows developers to accept every possible value when validating a model.

💻 Development

📁 Code structure

The code is structured as follows:

• src/plugantic/ contains the source code
• tests/ contains the tests

Most of the actual logic is in the src/plugantic/plugin.py file.

📦 Distribution

To build the package, you can do the following:

uv run build

Publishing

💡 This section is primarily relevant for the maintainers of this package (me), as it requires permission to push a package to the plugantic repository on PyPI.

uv run publish --token <token>

🎯 Tests

To run all tests, you can do the following:

uv run pytest