How to properly subclass dict and override get/set

Question

I am debugging some code and I want to find out when a particular dictionary is accessed. Well, it's actually a class that subclass dict and implements a couple extra features. Anyway, what I would like to do is subclass dict myself and add override __getitem__ and __setitem__ to produce some debugging output. Right now, I have

class DictWatch(dict):
    def __init__(self, *args):
        dict.__init__(self, args)

    def __getitem__(self, key):
        val = dict.__getitem__(self, key)
        log.info("GET %s['%s'] = %s" % str(dict.get(self, 'name_label')), str(key), str(val)))
        return val

    def __setitem__(self, key, val):
        log.info("SET %s['%s'] = %s" % str(dict.get(self, 'name_label')), str(key), str(val)))
        dict.__setitem__(self, key, val)

'name_label' is a key which will eventually be set that I want to use to identify the output. I have then changed the class I am instrumenting to subclass DictWatch instead of dict and changed the call to the superconstructor. Still, nothing seems to be happening. I thought I was being clever, but I wonder if I should be going a different direction.

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

What you're doing should absolutely work. I tested out your class, and aside from a missing opening parenthesis in your log statements, it works just fine. There are only two things I can think of. First, is the output of your log statement set correctly? You might need to put a logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG) at the top of your script. Second, __getitem__ and __setitem__ are only called during [] accesses. So make sure you only access DictWatch via d[key], rather than d.get() and d.set().

Answer 2

That should not really change the result (which should work, for good logging threshold values) : your init should be :

def __init__(self,*args,**kwargs) : dict.__init__(self,*args,**kwargs) 

instead, because if you call your method with DictWatch([(1,2),(2,3)]) or DictWatch(a=1,b=2) this will fail.

(or,better, don't define a constructor for this)

Answer 3

Another issue when subclassing dict is that the built-in __init__ doesn't call update, and the built-in update doesn't call __setitem__. So, if you want all setitem operations to go through your __setitem__ function, you should make sure that it gets called yourself:

class DictWatch(dict):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.update(*args, **kwargs)

    def __getitem__(self, key):
        val = dict.__getitem__(self, key)
        print 'GET', key
        return val

    def __setitem__(self, key, val):
        print 'SET', key, val
        dict.__setitem__(self, key, val)

    def __repr__(self):
        dictrepr = dict.__repr__(self)
        return '%s(%s)' % (type(self).__name__, dictrepr)

    def update(self, *args, **kwargs):
        print 'update', args, kwargs
        for k, v in dict(*args, **kwargs).iteritems():
            self[k] = v