caching.CachedProperty

A cached property

Oftentimes you have a property on a class that never gets changed and needs to be calculated only once. This is a good situation to use caching.CachedProperty in order to have that property be calculated only one time per instance. Any future accesses to the property will use the cached value.

Example:

>>> import time
>>> from python_toolbox import caching
>>>
>>> class MyObject(object):
...     # ... Regular definitions here
...     def _get_personality(self):
...         print('Calculating personality...')
...         time.sleep(5) # Time consuming process...
...         return 'Nice person'
...     personality = caching.CachedProperty(_get_personality)

Now we create an object and calculate its “personality”:

>>> my_object = MyObject()
>>> my_object.personality
'Nice person'
>>> # We had to wait 5 seconds for the calculation!

Consecutive calls will be instantaneous:

>>> my_object.personality
'Nice person'
>>> # That one was cached and therefore instantaneous!