Encapsulating retries into `with` block

Question

Is it possible to repeat the code within a with statement?

No.

As pointed out earlier in that mailing list thread, you can reduce a bit of duplication by making the decorator call the passed function:

def do_work():
    ...
    # This is not ideal!
    @transaction(retries=3)
    def _perform_in_transaction():
        # Atomic DB statements
        ...
    # called implicitly
    ...

The way that occurs to me to do this is just to implement a standard database transaction context manager, but allow it to take a retries argument in the constructor. Then I'd just wrap that up in your method implementations. Something like this:

class transaction(object):
    def __init__(self, retries=0):
        self.retries = retries
    def __enter__(self):
        return self
    def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_val, traceback):
        pass

    # Implementation...
    def execute(self, query):
        err = None
        for _ in range(self.retries):
            try:
                return self._cursor.execute(query)
            except Exception as e:
                err = e # probably ought to save all errors, but hey
        raise err

with transaction(retries=3) as cursor:
    cursor.execute('BLAH')

As decorators are just functions themselves, you could do the following:

with transaction(_perform_in_transaction, retries=3) as _perf:
    _perf()

For the details, you'd need to implement transaction() as a factory method that returns an object with __callable__() set to call the original method and repeat it up to retries number of times on failure; __enter__() and __exit__() would be defined as normal for database transaction context managers.

You could alternatively set up transaction() such that it itself executes the passed method up to retries number of times, which would probably require about the same amount of work as implementing the context manager but would mean actual usage would be reduced to just transaction(_perform_in_transaction, retries=3) (which is, in fact, equivalent to the decorator example delnan provided).

While I agree it can't be done with a context manager... it can be done with two context managers!

The result is a little awkward, and I am not sure whether I approve of my own code yet, but this is what it looks like as the client:

with RetryManager(retries=3) as rm:
    while rm:
        with rm.protect:
            print("Attempt #%d of %d" % (rm.attempt_count, rm.max_retries))
             # Atomic DB statements

There is an explicit while loop still, and not one, but two, with statements, which leaves a little too much opportunity for mistakes for my liking.

Here's the code:

class RetryManager(object):
    """ Context manager that counts attempts to run statements without
        exceptions being raised.
        - returns True when there should be more attempts
    """

    class _RetryProtector(object):
        """ Context manager that only raises exceptions if its parent
            RetryManager has given up."""
        def __init__(self, retry_manager):
            self._retry_manager = retry_manager

        def __enter__(self):
            self._retry_manager._note_try()
            return self

        def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_val, traceback):
            if exc_type is None:
                self._retry_manager._note_success()
            else:
                # This would be a good place to implement sleep between
                # retries.
                pass

            # Suppress exception if the retry manager is still alive.
            return self._retry_manager.is_still_trying()

    def __init__(self, retries=1):

        self.max_retries = retries
        self.attempt_count = 0 # Note: 1-based.
        self._success = False

        self.protect = RetryManager._RetryProtector(self)

    def __enter__(self):
        return self

    def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_val, traceback):
        pass

    def _note_try(self):
        self.attempt_count += 1

    def _note_success(self):
        self._success = True

    def is_still_trying(self):
        return not self._success and self.attempt_count < self.max_retries

    def __bool__(self):
        return self.is_still_trying()

---

Bonus: I know you don't want to separate your work off into separate functions wrapped with decorators... but if you were happy with that, the redo package from Mozilla offers the decorators to do that, so you don't have to roll your own. There is even a Context Manager that effective acts as temporary decorator for your function, but it still relies on your retrievable code to be factored out into a single function.