[Grok-dev] Re: Are functions starting with "handle_" considered special?

[Martijn Faassen]

Hey,

Jan-Wijbrand Kolman wrote:
> I'm "porting" my application to the latest Grok version and suddenly, 
> whenever I try to go the http://localhost:8080/applications I get an 
> error message.
> 
> After a bit of digging, I found that somehow, for some reason, a module 
> level function in my application called "handle_cascade" is being 
> invoked by the documentation grokking machinery(?).
> 
> It seems names starting with 'handle_' are considered special. I'm not 
> sure I like that. Can someone explain why these names are special?

This is news to me too. It looks like this is the case in docgrok.py 
however - a grokker is defined that looks for things called handle_. 
While this is an example I used in Martian, I don't think it would be 
good to actually pick up functions. The problem with this approach is 
that one JW ran into - you can't define functions that start with that 
name anymore.

A better pattern would be to define a docgrok specific base class and 
look for subclasses of those. This eliminates the risk of namespace 
pollution.

*If* we want to actually grok functions, let's only grok those that are 
actually decorated, like the example of @grok.subscriber.

Regards,

Martijn