sw.objectinspection 1.0

Provides an API to access an objects references (children).

sw.objectinspection

ObjectInspection is a tool, that provides you with a generic API to inspect objects for their attributes and their children objects. It comes with two basic inspectors (BasicAttributesInspector and BasicChildrenInspector) which can be easily replaced with your own inspectors.

Setup

Create some objects, which are inspected later on:

>>> class Child1(object):
...     pass
>>> class Child2(object):
...     pass
>>> class Child3(object):
...     pass
>>> class Child4(object):
...     misc = Child1()
>>> class ToInspect(object):
...     some_var = ["some tupel", (Child2(), Child3())]
...     other_var = {"foo": "bar"}
...     _private_var = 10
...     desc = Child4()
...
...     def some_method(self):
...         pass

Inspecting for attributes

Get the AttributesInspector by adapting to IAttributesInspector:

>>> from sw.objectinspection import IAttributesInspector
>>> inspector = IAttributesInspector(ToInspect())

Because there is no specialized inspector for the ToInspect object registered, the BasicAttributesInspector is used:

>>> inspector
<sw.objectinspection.BasicAttributesInspector object at 0x11f69d0
 used for ToInspect object at 0x11f6910>

To start the inspection, simply call the inspector:

>>> inspector()
['desc', 'other_var', 'some_var']

Inspecting for children

Inspection for children works the same way like inspection for attributes:

>>> from sw.objectinspection import IChildrenInspector
>>> inspector = IChildrenInspector(ToInspect())

>>> inspector
<sw.objectinspection.BasicChildrenInspector object at 0x11f6a10
 used for ToInspect object at 0x11f6910>

>>> sorted(inspector())
[<Child2 object at 0x119cc10>,
 <Child3 object at 0x11f5790>,
 <Child4 object at 0x11f5830>]

Writing own inspectors

You can write your own inspector and register it as a more special adapter than the basic ones which come with this package:

>>> from sw.objectinspection import BasicInspector
>>> import zope.component
>>> import zope.interface

>>> class DummyAttributesInspector(BasicInspector):
...     zope.component.adapts(ToInspect)
...     zope.interface.implements(IAttributesInspector)
...
...     def __call__(self):
...         # The object, which is to be inspected, can be accessed
...         # with self._inspecting
...         return ['foo', 'bar']

>>> gsm = zope.component.getGlobalSiteManager()
>>> gsm.registerAdapter(DummyAttributesInspector)

Now, when inspecting ToInspect for attributes, we get our DummyAttributesInspector:

>>> inspector = IAttributesInspector(ToInspect())
>>> inspector
<DummyAttributesInspector object at 0x11f69d0
 used for ToInspect object at 0x11f6910>
>>> inspector()
['foo', 'bar']

CHANGES

1.0 (2009-07-29)

• Initial release.