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Decorators with optional arguments
Anubhav Gain
2024-04-30
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Decorators with optional arguments#

sqlite-utils provides a decorator for registering custom Python functions that looks like this:

from sqlite_utils import Database


db = Database(memory=True)


@db.register_function
def reverse_string(s):
    return "".join(reversed(list(s)))

I wanted to add an optional deterministic=True parameter to the decorator.

Problem: the decorator currently does not take any arguments. But I wanted this to work as well:

@db.register_function(deterministic=True)
def reverse_string(s):
    return "".join(reversed(list(s)))

I don’t want to break backwards compatibility with existing code.

First lesson: any time you are designing a decorator that might accept arguments in the future, design it to work like this!

@db.register_function()
def reverse_string(s):
    return "".join(reversed(list(s)))

Since I hadn’t done that, I needed an alternative pattern that could differentiate between the two ways in which the decorator might be called. I ended up going with this:

    def register_function(self, fn=None, deterministic=None):
        def register(fn):
            name = fn.__name__
            arity = len(inspect.signature(fn).parameters)
            kwargs = {}
            if deterministic and sys.version_info >= (3, 8):
                kwargs["deterministic"] = True
            self.conn.create_function(name, arity, fn, **kwargs)
            return fn


        if fn is None:
            return register
        else:
            register(fn)
Decorators with optional arguments
https://mranv.pages.dev/posts/decorators-with-optional-arguments/
Author
Anubhav Gain
Published at
2024-04-30
License
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
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