20.15. Class Decorators¶
Recall that Python has a “decorator” syntax” that allows us to modify the behavior of functions. We can use this same syntax to modify the behavior of classes. There are two ways we can use decorators with classes: (1) by decorating individual class methods or (2) by decorating the class itself.
Decorating class methods is analogous to the function decorators we’ve already seen. For example, suppose we have the addLogging function from earlier:
def addLogging(func): # The argument, func is a function
def wrapper(x): # x is the argument that we're going to pass to func
print(f"About to call the function with argument {x}")
result = func(x) # actually call our function and store the result
print(f"Done with the function with argument {x}. Result: {result}")
return result # return whatever our function returned
return wrapper # return our new function
We first need to modify this function slightly to add self as the first argument, since it will be a method of a class. Then, we can use the function to decorate any class method that accepts one argument:
Beyond decorating class methods, we can also decorate the class itself. Just like functions in Python, classes are “first class”, meaning they can be referenced like any other object, passed as arguments, returned, and wrapped. We decorate classes in almost the same way that we decorate functions, except that our decorator accepts a class as an argument, rather than a function. We could then modify the class, or return a new class. For example, suppose we want to create a decorator (named addBeep) that adds an extra method (named beep) to any class. We could do that as follows: