[Grok-dev] Re: Grok and database generations

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Sebastian Ware wrote:
> I have been looking at the zope.app.generations package. For those who 
> don't know about it, generations keeps track on your objects. The 
> generations schema manager allows you to execute an evolve method in 
> order to update objects to a required level of functionality. To 
> determine which objects to update ituses a counter.
> 
> However, my most usual use case is that I have added some new default 
> values to the __init__ method of a class and I want to update all the 
> objects of that class to reflect this change. But I want to do this 
> without having to write any extra code. I just want to sync my objects...
> 
> Is there any simple and smart way I could do this?

Yup. It's called class attributes. When an instance doesn't have a 
particular attribute, but a class does, the class attribute will be 
used. When overwritten, it will be done so on the instance. For example::

   class Foo(object):

       # make sure old instances also get this attribute
       attr = default_value_for_old_instances

       def __init__(self, attr=some_default):
           self.attr = attr

So if you have an instance of 'Foo' that was created before __init__ set 
the 'attr' attribute, it will now be possible to say 'foo_instance.attr' 
and it will resolve to 'default_value_for_old_instances'.

> If not, would this not be an excellent feature to add to Grok?

For simple cases, I think defensive programming (e.g. gracefully 
handling the absence of attributes) and tricks like I've shown above 
work well enough that we don't need something special in Grok.

*If* we have to introduce something to Grok, then it'll likely have to 
handle trickier things as well. But tricky things are hard to do 
in-place. They usually require good understanding of the way the ZODB 
works. I think 'dump and reload' is much easier when you have massive 
and/or tricky refactorings going on. As Tres says, it's not a surprise 
that pretty much all RDBMS do it this way.


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