Acquisition is a mechanism that allows objects to obtain attributes from their environment. It is similar to inheritance, except that, rather than searching an inheritance hierarchy to obtain attributes, a containment hierarchy is traversed.
Zope implements acquisition with Extension Class mix-in classes. To use acquisition your classes must inherit from an acquisition base class. For example:
import ExtensionClass, Acquisition
class C(ExtensionClass.Base):
color='red'
class A(Acquisition.Implicit):
def report(self):
print self.color
a=A()
c=C()
c.a=A()
c.a.report() # prints 'red'
d=C()
d.color='green'
d.a=a
d.a.report() # prints 'green'
a.report() # raises an attribute error
The class A inherits acquisition behavior from
Acquisition.Implicit. The object, a, "has" the color of
objects c and d when it is accessed through them, but it has
no color by itself. The object a obtains attributes from its
environment, where its environment is defined by the access path
used to reach a.
When an object that supports acquisition is accessed through an
extension class instance, a special object, called an acquisition
wrapper, is returned. In the example above, the expression c.a
returns an acquisition wrapper that contains references to both
c and a. It is this wrapper that performs attribute lookup in
c when an attribute cannot be found in a.
Acquisition wrappers provide access to the wrapped objects through
the attributes aq_parent, aq_self, aq_base. In the example
above, the expressions:
'c.a.aq_parent is c'
and:
'c.a.aq_self is a'
both evaluate to true, but the expression:
'c.a is a'
evaluates to false, because the expression c.a evaluates to an
acquisition wrapper around c and a, not a itself.
The attribute aq_base is similar to aq_self. Wrappers may be
nested and aq_self may be a wrapped object. The aq_base
attribute is the underlying object with all wrappers removed.
You can manually wrap object using the __of__ method. For
example:
class A(Acquisition.Implicit):
pass
a=A()
a.color='red'
b=A()
a.b=b
print b.__of__(a).color # prints red
The expression b.__of__(a) wraps b in an acquisition wrapper
just like a.b does.
Two styles of acquisition are supported: implicit and explicit acquisition.
Implicit acquisition is so named because it searches for attributes from the environment automatically whenever an attribute cannot be obtained directly from an object or through inheritance.
An attribute can be implicitly acquired if its name does not begin with an underscore.
To support implicit acquisition, your class should inherit from
the mix-in class Acquisition.Implicit.
When explicit acquisition is used, attributes are not
automatically obtained from the environment. Instead, the
method aq_acquire must be used. For example:
print c.a.aq_acquire('color')
To support explicit acquisition, your class should inherit from
the mix-in class Acquisition.Explicit.
A class (or instance) can provide attribute by attribute control
over acquisition. Your should subclass from
Acquisition.Explicit, and set all attributes that should be
acquired to the special value Acquisition.Acquired. Setting
an attribute to this value also allows inherited attributes to
be overridden with acquired ones. For example:
class C(Acquisition.Explicit):
id=1
secret=2
color=Acquisition.Acquired
__roles__=Acquisition.Acquired
The only attributes that are automatically acquired from
containing objects are color, and __roles__. Note that the
__roles__ attribute is acquired even though its name begins
with an underscore. In fact, the special Acquisition.Acquired
value can be used in Acquisition.Implicit objects to
implicitly acquire selected objects that smell like private
objects.
Sometimes, you want to dynamically make an implicitly acquiring
object acquire explicitly. You can do this by getting the object's
aq_explicit attribute. This attribute provides the object with
an explicit wrapper that places the original implicit wrapper.
The acquisition method, aq_acquire, accepts two optional
arguments. The first of the additional arguments is a
"filtering" function that is used when considering whether to
acquire an object. The second of the additional arguments is an
object that is passed as extra data when calling the filtering
function and which defaults to None. The filter function is
called with five arguments:
The object that the aq_acquire method was called on,
The object where an object was found,
The name of the object, as passed to aq_acquire,
The object found, and
The extra data passed to aq_acquire.
If the filter returns a true object that the object found is returned, otherwise, the acquisition search continues.
For example, in:
from Acquisition import Explicit
class HandyForTesting:
def __init__(self, name):
self.name=name
def __str__(self):
return "%s(%s)" % (self.name, self.__class__.__name__)
__repr__=__str__
class E(Explicit, HandyForTesting): pass
class Nice(HandyForTesting):
isNice=1
def __str__(self):
return HandyForTesting.__str__(self)+' and I am nice!'
__repr__=__str__
a=E('a')
a.b=E('b')
a.b.c=E('c')
a.p=Nice('spam')
a.b.p=E('p')
def find_nice(self, ancestor, name, object, extra):
return hasattr(object,'isNice') and object.isNice
print a.b.c.aq_acquire('p', find_nice)
The filtered acquisition in the last line skips over the first
attribute it finds with the name p, because the attribute
doesn't satisfy the condition given in the filter. The output of
the last line is:
spam(Nice) and I am nice!
Filtered acquisition is rarely used in Zope.
Normally acquisition allows objects to acquire data from their containers. However an object can acquire from objects that aren't its containers.
Most of the example's we've seen so far show establishing of an
acquisition context using getattr symanitics. For example,
a.b is a reference to b in the context of a.
You can also manuallyset acquisition context using the __of__
method. For example:
from Acquisition import Implicit
class C(Implicit): pass
a=C()
b=C()
a.color="red"
print b.__of__(a).color # prints red
In this case, a does not contain b, but it is put in 'b''s
context using the __of__ method.
Here's another subtler example that shows how you can construct an acquisition context that includes non-container objects:
from Acquisition import Implicit
class C(Implicit):
def __init__(self, name):
self.name=name
a=C("a")
a.b=C("b")
a.b.color="red"
a.x=C("x")
print a.b.x.color # prints red
Even though b does not contain x, x can acquire the color
attribute from b. This works because in this case, x is
accessed in the context of b even though it is not contained by
b.
Here acquisition context is defined by the objects used to access another object.
If in the example above suppose both a and b have an
color attribute:
a=C("a")
a.color="green"
a.b=C("b")
a.b.color="red"
a.x=C("x")
print a.b.x.color # prints green
Why does a.b.x.color acquire color from a and not from b?
The answer is that an object acquires from its containers before
non-containers in its context.
To see why consider this example in terms of expressions using the
__of__ method:
a.x -> x.__of__(a)
a.b -> b.__of__(a)
a.b.x -> x.__of__(a).__of__(b.__of__(a))
Keep in mind that attribute lookup in a wrapper is done by trying to look up the attribute in the wrapped object first and then in the parent object. So in the expressions above proceeds from left to right.
The upshot of these rules is that attributes are looked up by containment before context.
This rule holds true also for more complex examples. For example,
a.b.c.d.e.f.g.attribute would search for attribute in g and
all its containers first. (Containers are searched in order from
the innermost parent to the outermost container.) If the attribute
is not found in g or any of its containers, then the search moves
to f and all its containers, and so on.
You can use the special method aq_inner to access an object
wrapped only by containment. So in the example above:
a.b.x.aq_inner
is equivalent to:
a.x
You can find out the acquisition context of an object using the
aq_chain method like so:
a.b.x.aq_chain # returns [x, b, a]
You can find out if an object is in the acquisition context of
another object using the aq_inContextOf method. For example:
a.b.x.aq_inContextOf(a.b) # returns 1
You can also pass an additional argument to aq_inContextOf to
indicate whether to only check containment rather than the full
acquisition context. For example:
a.b.x.aq_inContextOf(a.b, 1) # returns 0
Note: as of this writing the aq_inContextOf examples don't
work. According to Jim, this is because aq_inContextOf works by
comparing object pointer addresses, which (because they are
actually different wrapper objects) doesn't give you the expected
results. He acknowledges that this behavior is controversial, and
says that there is a collector entry to change it so that you
would get the answer you expect in the above. (We just need to get
to it).
In addition to using acquisition attributes and methods directly
on objects you can use similar functions defined in the
Acquisition module. These functions have the advantage that you
don't need to check to make sure that the object has the method or
attribute before calling it.
aq_acquire(object, name [, filter, extra, explicit, default, containment])This function can be used to explictly acquire when using explicit acquisition and to acquire names that wouldn't normally be acquired.
The function accepts a number of optional arguments:
filterThe filter is called with five arguments:
The object that the aq_acquire method was called on,
The object where an object was found,
The name of the object, as passed to aq_acquire,
The object found, and
The extra argument passed to aq_acquire.
If the filter returns a true object that the object found is returned, otherwise, the acquisition search continues.
extraexplicitThis argument is useful if you want to apply a filter without overriding explicit wrappers.
defaultcontainmentIn addition, arguments can be provided as keywords.
aq_base(object)aq_chain(object [, containment])containment,
controls whether the containment or access hierarchy is used.aq_get(object, name [, default, containment])aq_inner(object)aq_parent(object)None if the object is unwrapped.aq_self(object)In most cases it is more convenient to use these module functions instead of the acquisition attributes and methods directly.
Python methods of objects that support acquisition can use acquired attributes. When a Python method is called on an object that is wrapped by an acquisition wrapper, the wrapper is passed to the method as the first argument. This rule also applies to user-defined method types and to C methods defined in pure mix-in classes.
Unfortunately, C methods defined in extension base classes that define their own data structures, cannot use aquired attributes at this time. This is because wrapper objects do not conform to the data structures expected by these methods. In practice, you will seldom find this a problem.
Acquisition provides a powerful way to dynamically share information between objects. Zope using acquisition for a number of its key features including security, object publishing, and DTML variable lookup. Acquisition also provides an elegant solution to the problem of circular references for many classes of problems. While acquisition is powerful, you should take care when using acquisition in your applications. The details can get complex, especially with the differences between acquiring from context and acquiring from containment.