Question

I have a class which contains a large amount of properties. More specifically, the class represents my router.
I want to divide its properties to categories, meaning that in order to retrieve the LAN ip and the WAN ip I would not have to type:

router.wan_ip
router.lan_ip

But instead type:

router.wan.ip
router.lan.ip

The properties are dynamic and retrieved when calling their functions. My current implementation:

class Category(object):
    def __init__(self, parent):
        self._parent = parent

class Lan(Category):
    @property
    def ip(self):
        self._parent._get_property("lanip")

class Wan(Category):
    @property
    def ip(self):
        self._parent._get_property("wanip")

class Router(object):
    def __init__(self, ):
        self.lan = Lan(self)
        self.wan = Wan(self)

    def _get_property(self, property_name):
        # Some code here

But I wounder if there is a better way

Answer 1

You are probably overthinking this structure, but if you want objects…

Wan and Lan should not exist. You can pass a prefix for the Category class so it will search for ...ip. The _get_property method could be replaced by a dictionary. If you need to calculate the values on the fly, you may create a dict with functions to be called.

class Category(object):
    def __init__(self, parent, prefix):
        self.parent = parent
        self.prefix = prefix
    @property
    def ip(self):
        self.parent.data[self.prefix + "ip"]

class Router(object):
    def __init__(self, data):
        self.lan = Category(self, 'lan')
        self.wan = Category(self, 'wan')
        self.data = data

By the way, this program doesn’t need to have any class at all. Seems like you just need dictionaries. You can create a function to build these dictionaries if needed

router = {'wan': {'ip': '1.2.3.4'}, 'lan': {'ip': '2.3.4.5'}}