decorating a memberfunction

[Ulrich Eckhardt]

Hi!

I have a class that maintains a network connection, which can be used to
query and trigger Things(tm). Apart from "normal" errors, a broken network
connection and a protocol violation from the peer are something we can't
recover from without creating a new connection, so those errors
should "stick".

The code looks roughly like this:

class Client(object):
    def __init__(self, ...):
        self._error = None

    def _check(fn):
        def do_check(self, *args, **kwargs):
            # check for sticky error
            if self._error:
                raise self._error

            try:
                fn(self, *args, **kwargs)
            except NetworkError, e:
                self._error = e
                raise
            except ProtocolError, e:
                self._error = e
                raise
        return do_check

    @_check
    def frobnicate(self, foo):
        # format and send request, read and parse answer

So, any function like frobnicate() that does things is decorated with
_check() so that unrecoverable errors stick. I hope I didn't shorten the
code too much to understand the principle, in particular I'm using
functools.wraps() in order to retain function names and docstrings.


Is this sound? Would you have done it differently? Any other suggestions?
What I'm mostly unsure about is whether the definition of _check() and
do_check() are correct or could be improved.


Thanks!

Uli

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