How to properly subclass dict and override __getitem__ & __setitem__

Question

I am debugging some code and I want to find out when a particular dictionary is accessed. Well, it's actually a class that subclass dict and implements a couple extra features. Anyway, what I would like to do is subclass dict myself and add override __getitem__ and __setitem__ to produce some debugging output. Right now, I have

class DictWatch(dict):
    def __init__(self, *args):
        dict.__init__(self, args)

    def __getitem__(self, key):
        val = dict.__getitem__(self, key)
        log.info("GET %s['%s'] = %s" % str(dict.get(self, 'name_label')), str(key), str(val)))
        return val

    def __setitem__(self, key, val):
        log.info("SET %s['%s'] = %s" % str(dict.get(self, 'name_label')), str(key), str(val)))
        dict.__setitem__(self, key, val)

'name_label' is a key which will eventually be set that I want to use to identify the output. I have then changed the class I am instrumenting to subclass DictWatch instead of dict and changed the call to the superconstructor. Still, nothing seems to be happening. I thought I was being clever, but I wonder if I should be going a different direction.

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

Another issue when subclassing dict is that the built-in __init__ doesn't call update, and the built-in update doesn't call __setitem__. So, if you want all setitem operations to go through your __setitem__ function, you should make sure that it gets called yourself:

class DictWatch(dict):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.update(*args, **kwargs)

    def __getitem__(self, key):
        val = dict.__getitem__(self, key)
        print('GET', key)
        return val

    def __setitem__(self, key, val):
        print('SET', key, val)
        dict.__setitem__(self, key, val)

    def __repr__(self):
        dictrepr = dict.__repr__(self)
        return '%s(%s)' % (type(self).__name__, dictrepr)
        
    def update(self, *args, **kwargs):
        print('update', args, kwargs)
        for k, v in dict(*args, **kwargs).items():
            self[k] = v

Answer 2

What you're doing should absolutely work. I tested out your class, and aside from a missing opening parenthesis in your log statements, it works just fine. There are only two things I can think of. First, is the output of your log statement set correctly? You might need to put a logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG) at the top of your script.

Second, __getitem__ and __setitem__ are only called during [] accesses. So make sure you only access DictWatch via d[key], rather than d.get() and d.set()

Answer 3

Consider subclassing UserDict or UserList. These classes are intended to be subclassed whereas the normal dict and list are not, and contain optimisations.

Answer 4

That should not really change the result (which should work, for good logging threshold values) : your init should be :

def __init__(self,*args,**kwargs) : dict.__init__(self,*args,**kwargs) 

instead, because if you call your method with DictWatch([(1,2),(2,3)]) or DictWatch(a=1,b=2) this will fail.

(or,better, don't define a constructor for this)

Answer 5

As Andrew Pate's answer proposed, subclassing collections.UserDict instead of dict is much less error prone.

Here is an example showing an issue when inheriting dict naively:

class MyDict(dict):

  def __setitem__(self, key, value):
    super().__setitem__(key, value * 10)


d = MyDict(a=1, b=2)  # Bad! MyDict.__setitem__ not called
d.update(c=3)  # Bad! MyDict.__setitem__ not called
d['d'] = 4  # Good!
print(d)  # {'a': 1, 'b': 2, 'c': 3, 'd': 40}

UserDict inherits from collections.abc.MutableMapping, so this works as expected:

class MyDict(collections.UserDict):

  def __setitem__(self, key, value):
    super().__setitem__(key, value * 10)


d = MyDict(a=1, b=2)  # Good: MyDict.__setitem__ correctly called
d.update(c=3)  # Good: MyDict.__setitem__ correctly called
d['d'] = 4  # Good
print(d)  # {'a': 10, 'b': 20, 'c': 30, 'd': 40}

Similarly, you only have to implement __getitem__ to automatically be compatible with key in my_dict, my_dict.get, …

Note: UserDict is not a subclass of dict, so isinstance(UserDict(), dict) will fail (but isinstance(UserDict(), collections.abc.MutableMapping) will work).

Answer 6

All you will have to do is

class BatchCollection(dict):
    def __init__(self, inpt={}):
        super(BatchCollection, self).__init__(inpt)

A sample usage for my personal use

### EXAMPLE
class BatchCollection(dict):
    def __init__(self, inpt={}):
        super(BatchCollection, self).__init__(inpt)

    def __setitem__(self, key, item):
        if (isinstance(key, tuple) and len(key) == 2
                and isinstance(item, collections.Iterable)):
            # self.__dict__[key] = item
            super(BatchCollection, self).__setitem__(key, item)
        else:
            raise Exception(
                "Valid key should be a tuple (database_name, table_name) "
                "and value should be iterable")

Note: tested only in python3