Decorator Classes

Decorator Classes are a structure to write more sophisticated decorators that have an internal state. They allow you to pass arguments into the decorator as well.

Key points:

• the constructor __init__() receives the arguments given in the line starting with @

• the __call__() method should return the decorator function

• the safe_call() method gets called in the end (you can give it a different name)

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Code Example

Here is a code example that counts how many errors have been produced.

class FailureCounter:

    def __init__(self, message):
        self.message = message
        self.function = None
        self.failcount = 0

    def __call__(self, func):
        self.function = func
        return self.safe_call

    def safe_call(self, *args):
        try:
            self.function(*args)
        except IOError:
            self.failcount += 1
            print(self.message)
            print(f'An I/O error was caught in {self.function.__name__}')
            print(f"with the file name '{args[0]}'")
            print(f'this is failure #{self.failcount}\n')

@FailureCounter('--- FILE ERROR ---')
def risky_fileopen(filename):
    open(filename)

risky_fileopen('not_existing_file')
risky_fileopen('doesnotexist_either')