Question

I was wondering if there is anything wrong (from a OOP point of view) in doing something like this:

class Foobar:
    foobars = {}
    def __init__(self, name, something):
        self.name = name
        self.something = something

        Foobar.foobars[name] = self

Foobar('first', 42)
Foobar('second', 77)

for name in Foobar.foobars:
    print name, Foobar.foobars[name]

EDIT: this is the actual piece of code I’m using right now

from threading import Event
class Task:
    ADDED, WAITING_FOR_DEPS, READY, IN_EXECUTION, DONE = range(5)
    tasks = {}
    def __init__(self, name, dep_names, job, ins, outs, uptodate, where):
        self.name = name
        self.dep_names = [dep_names] if isinstance(dep_names, str) else dep_names
        self.job = job
        self.where = where
        self.done = Event()
        self.status = Task.ADDED
        self.jobs = []
        # other stuff...
        Task.tasks[name] = self
    def set_done(self):
        self.done.set()
        self.status = Task.DONE
    def wait_for_deps(self):
        self.status = Task.WAITING_FOR_DEPS
        for dep_name in self.dep_names:
            Task.tasks[dep_name].done.wait()
        self.status = Task.READY
    def add_jobs_to_queues(self):
        jobs = self.jobs
        # a lot of stuff I trimmed here
        for w in self.where: Queue.queues[w].put(jobs)
        self.status = Task.IN_EXECUTION
    def wait_for_jobs(self):
        for j in self.jobs: j.wait()
    #[...]

As you can see I need to access the dictionary with all the instances in
the wait_for_deps method. Would it make more sense to have a global variable
instead of a class field? I could be using a wrong approach here, maybe that
stuff shouldn’t even be in a method, but it made sense to me (I’m new to OOP)

Answer 1

Yes. It’s bad. It conflates the instance with the collection of instances.

Collections are one thing.

The instances which are collected are unrelated.

Also, class-level variables which get updated confuse some of us. Yes, we can eventually reason on what’s going on, but the Standard Expectation™ is that state change applies to objects, not classes.

---

 class Foobar_Collection( dict ):
     def __init__( self, *arg, **kw ):
         super( Foobar_Collection, self ).__init__( *arg, **kw ):
     def foobar( self, *arg, **kw ):
         fb= Foobar( *arg, **kw )
         self[fb.name]= fb
         return fb

 class Foobar( object ):
     def __init__( self, name, something )
         self.name= name
         self.something= something

fc= Foobar_Collection()
fc.foobar( 'first', 42 )
fc.foobar( 'second', 77 ) 

for name in fc:
    print name, fc[name]

That’s more typical.

---

In your example, the wait_for_deps is simply a method of the task collection, not the individual task. You don’t need globals.

You need to refactor.