Class extension confusion :(

[r0g]

I have a subclass of BaseHHTPRequestHandler which uses a dictonary 
"paths" and a function "api_call" which are defined in the main 
namespace of the module. I'd rather I was able to pass these object to 
the constructor and store them as data attributes "self.paths" and 
"self.api_call" but I'm not sure how to do that properly. My 
understanding is that one may extend a constructor by defining it's 
__init__ method, calling the parents constructor and then adding ones 
own attributes to taste. What I don't understand is where or how I am 
supposed to get these extra constructor arguments into the class given 
that I don't instantiate it myself, it is seemingly instantiated by 
HTTPServer class that I pass it to e.g.

httpd = HTTPServer(server_address, PlainAJAXRequestHandler)

I wondered if I ought to instantiate an instance of 
PlainAJAXRequestHandler, set the attributes (either manually or by 
extending it's constructor) and pass that to HTTPServer but I figured it 
expects a class not an instance as it probably wants to spawn one 
instance for each request so that would be a non starter. Might I need 
to subclass HTTPServer, find the bit that instantiates the request 
handler and override that so it passes it's constructor more parameters? 
Right now I'm pretty confused, can somebody please tell me how I might 
accomplish this, what I'm failing to grasp or point me to the docs that 
explain it - I've spent the last hour or two plowing through docs to no 
avail, I guess it's a case of keyword ignorance on my part! Code follows...

Thanks for reading!

Roger.



class PlainAJAXRequestHandler(BaseHTTPRequestHandler):

     paths = { "/": pages.main,
               "/jqtest/": pages.jqtest
             }

     def do_GET(self):

         # Handle JSON api calls
         if self.path[:6] == "/ajax?":
             getvars = urlparse.parse_qs( self.path[6:] )
             api_key = getvars[ "api" ][0]
             json_string = getvars[ "qry" ][0]
             json_object = json.loads( json_string )
             response = api_call( api_key, json_object )
             if response:
                 self.send_response(200)
                 self.send_header("Content-type", "application/json")
                 self.end_headers()
                 self.wfile.write( response )
             else:
                 self.send_response(404)
                 self.end_headers()
             return

         # Handle web pages
         try:
             page = self.paths[self.path]()
         except KeyError:
             self.send_response(404)
             self.end_headers()
             self.wfile.write( "404 - Document not found!" )
             return
         self.send_response(200)
         self.send_header("Content-type", "text/html")
         self.end_headers()
         self.wfile.write( page )
         return