Introspection Question: Determining subclass name in base class

[Robert Brewer]

Stephen Nesbitt wrote:
> Here's my implementation problem. I have a base class which has the 
> responsibility for providing entry into the logging system. Part of 
> the class responsibility is to ensure that lagger names are 
> consistent. For all intents and purposes this class should be 
> considered abstract and will always be subclassed.
> 
> What I want to do is the following:
> - allow the logger name to set explicitly. I've accomplished this by 
> adding a loggerName parameter to __init__ in the base class.
> - if the loggerName variable is None, then set it to the name of the 
> subclass for which we are initing.
> 
> There seem to be two issues here.
> 1) determining the subclass name inside the _init__method in the 
> abstract base class. All my efforts so far have resulted in the 
> name of the base class rather than the calling subclass.

So far, I think I understood what you're going for, but not why you're
running into problems. Here's an example of what I think does what you
want:

>>> class A(object):
... 	def __init__(self, loggerName=None):
... 		self.loggerName = loggerName or self.__class__.__name__
... 		
>>> A().loggerName
'A'
>>> class B(A): pass
... 
>>> B().loggerName
'B'

> 2) setting the default of a parameter to a function.

Now this, I don't understand, and that makes me think I misinterpreted
all the previous statements. Show us some code to make it more clear...?


Robert Brewer
MIS
Amor Ministries
fumanchu at amor.org