Zope: cannot access REQUEST under property decorator

Question

I'm trying to use the property decorator in a Class. While it works well per se, I can't use any code that has to access the REQUEST.

class SomeClass():
   #Zope magic code
   _properties=({'id':'someValue', 'type':'ustring', 'mode':'r'},)

  def get_someValue(self):
    return self.REQUEST

  @property
  def someValue(self):
    return self.REQUEST

Although calling get_someValue gets me the desired result, trying to access someValue raises an AttributeError.

What's the logic behind this behaviour? Is there a way to get around this limitation?

(I'm using Zope 2.13.16, Python 2.7.3)

Answer 1

The property decorator only works with new-style classes; that is to say, classes that inherit from object. Acquisition (which gives you access to the global REQUEST object via attribute access) on the other hand is very much 'old-skool' python and the two do not work well together, as property ignores acquisition wrappers, which are needed to acquire the REQUEST object.

Zope has it's own property-like method that pre-dates new-style classes and the property decorater, called ComputedAttribute, which actually predates the property decorator and new-style classes by many years. A ComputedAttribute-wrapped function does know how to behave with an Acquisition-wrapped object, though.

You can use ComputedAttibute much like the property decorator:

from ComputedAttribute import ComputedAttribute

class SomeClass():   
    @ComputedAttribute
    def someProperty(self):
        return 'somevalue'

The ComputedAttribute wrapper function also can be configured with a level of wrapping, which is what we need when dealing with Acquisition wrappers. You cannot use the ComputedAttribute as a decorator in that case:

class SomeClass():   
    def someValue(self):
        return self.REQUEST
    someValue = ComputedAttribute(someValue, 1)

It is easy enough to define a new function to do the decorating for us though:

from ComputedAttribute import ComputedAttribute

def computed_attribute_decorator(level=0):
    def computed_attribute_wrapper(func):
        return ComputedAttribute(func, level)
    return computed_attribute_wrapper

Stick this in a utility module somewhere, after which you can then use it as a callable decorator to mark something as an Acquisition-aware property:

class SomeClass(): 
    @computed_attribute_decorator(level=1)
    def someValue(self):
        return self.REQUEST

Note that unlike property, ComputedAttribute can only be used for getters; there is no support for setters or deleters.