python - Lazy loading of class attributes

Question

Class Foo has a bar, and it is not loaded until it is accessed. Further accesses to bar should incur no overhead.

class Foo(object):

    def get_bar(self):
        print "initializing"
        self.bar = "12345"
        self.get_bar = self._get_bar
        return self.bar

    def _get_bar(self):
        print "accessing"
        return self.bar

Is it possible to do something like this using properties or, better yet, attributes, instead of using a getter method?

The goal is to lazy load without overhead on all subsequent accesses...

Answer 1

There are some problems with the current answers. The solution with a property requires that you specify an additional class attribute and has the overhead of checking this attribute on each look up. The solution with __getattr__ has the issue that it hides this attribute until first access. This is bad for introspection and a workaround with __dir__ is inconvenient.

A better solution than the two proposed ones is utilizing descriptors directly. The werkzeug library has already a solution as werkzeug.utils.cached_property. It has a simple implementation so you can directly use it without having Werkzeug as dependency:

_missing = object()

class cached_property(object):
    """A decorator that converts a function into a lazy property.  The
    function wrapped is called the first time to retrieve the result
    and then that calculated result is used the next time you access
    the value::

        class Foo(object):

            @cached_property
            def foo(self):
                # calculate something important here
                return 42

    The class has to have a `__dict__` in order for this property to
    work.
    """

    # implementation detail: this property is implemented as non-data
    # descriptor.  non-data descriptors are only invoked if there is
    # no entry with the same name in the instance's __dict__.
    # this allows us to completely get rid of the access function call
    # overhead.  If one choses to invoke __get__ by hand the property
    # will still work as expected because the lookup logic is replicated
    # in __get__ for manual invocation.

    def __init__(self, func, name=None, doc=None):
        self.__name__ = name or func.__name__
        self.__module__ = func.__module__
        self.__doc__ = doc or func.__doc__
        self.func = func

    def __get__(self, obj, type=None):
        if obj is None:
            return self
        value = obj.__dict__.get(self.__name__, _missing)
        if value is _missing:
            value = self.func(obj)
            obj.__dict__[self.__name__] = value
        return value