onetime

Descriptor support for NIPY

Utilities to support special Python descriptors [1,2], in particular cached_property(), which has been available in the Python standard library since Python 3.8. We currently maintain aliases from earlier names for this descriptor, specifically OneTimeProperty and auto_attr.

cached_property() creates properties that are computed once and then stored as regular attributes. They can thus be evaluated later in the object’s life cycle, but once evaluated they become normal, static attributes with no function call overhead on access or any other constraints.

A special ResetMixin class is provided to add a .reset() method to users who may want to have their objects capable of resetting these computed properties to their ‘untriggered’ state.

References

[1] How-To Guide for Descriptors, Raymond Hettinger. https://docs.python.org/howto/descriptor.html

[2] Python data model, https://docs.python.org/reference/datamodel.html

ResetMixin()

A Mixin class to add a .reset() method to users of cached_property.

ResetMixin

class nibabel.onetime.ResetMixin

Bases: object

A Mixin class to add a .reset() method to users of cached_property.

By default, cached properties, once computed, become static. If they happen to depend on other parts of an object and those parts change, their values may now be invalid.

This class offers a .reset() method that users can call explicitly when they know the state of their objects may have changed and they want to ensure that all their special attributes should be invalidated. Once reset() is called, all their cached properties are reset to their cached_property() descriptors, and their accessor functions will be triggered again.

Warning

If a class has a set of attributes that are cached_property, but that can be initialized from any one of them, do NOT use this mixin! For instance, UniformTimeSeries can be initialized with only sampling_rate and t0, sampling_interval and time are auto-computed. But if you were to reset() a UniformTimeSeries, it would lose all 4, and there would be then no way to break the circular dependency chains.

If this becomes a problem in practice (for our analyzer objects it isn’t, as they don’t have the above pattern), we can extend reset() to check for a _no_reset set of names in the instance which are meant to be kept protected. But for now this is NOT done, so caveat emptor.

Examples

>>> class A(ResetMixin):
...     def __init__(self,x=1.0):
...         self.x = x
...
...     @cached_property
...     def y(self):
...         print('*** y computation executed ***')
...         return self.x / 2.0

>>> a = A(10)

About to access y twice, the second time no computation is done:

>>> a.y
*** y computation executed ***
5.0
>>> a.y
5.0

Changing x

>>> a.x = 20

a.y doesn’t change to 10, since it is a static attribute:

>>> a.y
5.0

We now reset a, and this will then force all auto attributes to recompute the next time we access them:

>>> a.reset()

About to access y twice again after reset():

>>> a.y
*** y computation executed ***
10.0
>>> a.y
10.0

__init__(*args, **kwargs)

reset() → None

Reset all cached_property attributes that may have fired already.