config-object-style-access.md

Config Object Style Access

Note

"Object Style Access", "Dot-notation Access" or "Object Style Notation" in this project refers to accessing content of "Dictionary-Alike" through object field/property.

When you create an instance/object of ConfiStore, despite it being an object, you still have to access key/value pairs through "Dict-Alike" notation. This is designed like that on purpose, because depending on architecture of your project, the "Object Style Access" might cause issues either to your code, or worse - to your architecture.

But, to provide tools for all other cases when you'd prefer to use "Object Style Access", the simputils.config.components.prisms.ObjConfigStorePrism prism was implemented.

Note

Concept of Prism was introduced in PHP "SimpUtils" project as sort of "Gateway" or "Interface" to the original object. It means when you create/get Prism of certain sort for the object, the Prism itself does not contain any real data, but stores reference to the target object and provides additional functionality, that affects the target object. For example: You try to modify Prism object, but in fact it modifies the underlying target object, or you are getting value from a Prism and it gets the value first from the target object, and then returns it. It's essentially ephemeral.

Why might you prefer to use "Object Style Access"?! Due to some very important benefits:

1. IDE Auto-Completion would improve your code quality.
2. IDE inspection highlights and other static analysis tools.
3. Reduction of unnecessary imports from your "Config-Enums" (fewer imports - less coupling).
4. Prisms customization is separated from the ConfigStore which can improve architecture in some cases.

Note

Best practise for this project is to use "Object Style Access", but it's up to you if it really fits your needs.

Though prisms do not require using "Enum Configs", it is considered a good practise generally for this project.

In short, to get "Object Style Access" config prism, just use obj property of ConfigStore

from simputils.config.models import ConfigStore
conf = ConfigStore({
   "field1": "value1",
   "field2": "value2",
   "field3": "value3",
})

conf_obj = conf.obj

# "Object Style Access" or "Dot-notation Access"
print(conf_obj.field2)

For the most part this object will behave identically to ConfigStore object.

How to use it (primitive variant)

Important

This is a very brief and quite crude example, it's only for demonstration, more info and examples will be added to best-practises documentation later on.

Example:

from simputils.config.components import ConfigHub
from simputils.config.components.prisms import ObjConfigStorePrism
from simputils.config.generic import BasicConfigEnum
from simputils.config.models import ConfigStore


# Creating Enum Config
class MyConfigEnum(BasicConfigEnum):
   VAL1 = "val1"
   VAL2 = "val2"
   VAL3 = "val3"


# Creating "Object Style Access" hints
class _Hints(ObjConfigStorePrism):
   val1: str = ...
   val2: int = ...
   val3: bool = ...


# The class itself should not be used directly for type hints, so we
# create the new type for this case based on our _Hints class
MyConfigType = type[_Hints]

if __name__ == "__main__":
   # Type-hint here will let our IDE provide autocompletion for developers
   conf: MyConfigType = ConfigHub.aggregate(
      {
         "val1": "test",
         "val2": 34,
         "val3": True,
      },
      target=ConfigStore(
         MyConfigEnum,
         strict_keys=True,
      ),
   ).obj
   
   # These will behave identically to `ConfigStore`
   print(conf, conf.applied_confs)
   
   # Accessing our keys in object-style
   print(conf.val1, conf.val2, conf.val3)

In this way the IDE hints and autocompletion should work on conf as expected.