Book Image

Mastering Object-oriented Python

By : Steven F. Lott, Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Mastering Object-oriented Python

By: Steven F. Lott, Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (26 chapters)
Mastering Object-oriented Python
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Some Preliminaries
Index

Creating a method function decorator


A decorator for a method function of a class definition is identical to a decorator for a standalone function. It's simply used in a different context. One small consequence of this different context is that we often must explicitly name the self variable.

One application for method function decoration is to produce an audit trail for object state change. Business applications often create stateful records; commonly, these are represented as rows in a relational database. We'll look at object representation in Chapter 9, Serializing and Saving – JSON, YAML, Pickle, CSV, and XML, Chapter10, Storing and Retrieving Objects via Shelve, and Chapter 11, Storing and Retrieving Objects via SQLite.

Note

When we have stateful records, the state changes need to be auditable. An audit can confirm that appropriate changes have been made to the records. In order to do the audit, the before and after version of each record must be available somewhere. Stateful database...