Decorator class

suggest change

As mentioned in the introduction, a decorator is a function that can be applied to another function to augment its behavior. The syntactic sugar is equivalent to the following: my_func = decorator(my_func). But what if the decorator was instead a class? The syntax would still work, except that now my_func gets replaced with an instance of the decorator class. If this class implements the __call__() magic method, then it would still be possible to use my_func as if it was a function:

class Decorator(object):
    """Simple decorator class."""

    def __init__(self, func):
        self.func = func

    def __call__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        print('Before the function call.')
        res = self.func(*args, **kwargs)
        print('After the function call.')
        return res

@Decorator
def testfunc():
    print('Inside the function.')

testfunc()
# Before the function call.
# Inside the function.
# After the function call.

Note that a function decorated with a class decorator will no longer be considered a “function” from type-checking perspective:

import types
isinstance(testfunc, types.FunctionType)
# False
type(testfunc)
# <class '__main__.Decorator'>

Decorating Methods

For decorating methods you need to define an additional __get__-method:

from types import MethodType

class Decorator(object):
    def __init__(self, func):
        self.func = func
        
    def __call__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        print('Inside the decorator.')
        return self.func(*args, **kwargs)
    
    def __get__(self, instance, cls):
        # Return a Method if it is called on an instance
        return self if instance is None else MethodType(self, instance)

class Test(object):
    @Decorator
    def __init__(self):
        pass
    
a = Test()

Inside the decorator.

Warning!

Class Decorators only produce one instance for a specific function so decorating a method with a class decorator will share the same decorator between all instances of that class:

from types import MethodType

class CountCallsDecorator(object):
    def __init__(self, func):
        self.func = func
        self.ncalls = 0    # Number of calls of this method
        
    def __call__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.ncalls += 1   # Increment the calls counter
        return self.func(*args, **kwargs)
    
    def __get__(self, instance, cls):
        return self if instance is None else MethodType(self, instance)

class Test(object):
    def __init__(self):
        pass
    
    @CountCallsDecorator
    def do_something(self):
        return 'something was done'
    
a = Test()
a.do_something()
a.do_something.ncalls   # 1
b = Test()
b.do_something()
b.do_something.ncalls   # 2

Found a mistake? Have a question or improvement idea? Let me know.

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