Make Dot Notation More Powerful With Getters and Setters

Dot notation provides a concise and elegant way to access and modify an object’s attributes.

Yet, with dot notation, we can not validate the updates made to an attribute.

This means we can assign invalid values to an instance’s attributes, as shown below:

One common way to avoid this is by defining a setter (set_side()), which validates the assignment step.

But explicitly invoking a setter method isn’t as elegant as dot notation, is it?

Ideally, we would want to:

• Use dot notation

• and still apply those validation checks

The @𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐲 decorator in Python can help.

Here’s how we can use it here.

First, define a getter as follows:

• Declare a method with the attribute’s name.

• There’s no need to specify any parameters for this method.

• Decorate it with the @𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐲 decorator.

Next, define a setter as follows:

• Declare a method with the attribute’s name.

• Specify the parameter you want to update the attribute with.

• Write the conditions as you usually would in any other setter method.

• Decorate it with the @𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐮𝐭𝐞-𝐧𝐚𝐦𝐞.𝐬𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫 decorator.

Done!

Now, you can use the dot notation while still having validation checks in place.

This is demonstrated below:

This approach offers both:

• The validation and control of explicit setters and getters.

• The elegance of dot notations.

Isn’t that cool?

This month’s free deep dive is due in the next few days. Are you interested in learning core Python-based OOP stuff?

I intend to cover all OOP concepts along with various cool things like magic methods, how to use them, advanced OOP in Python — getters and setters, class methods, static methods, metaclasses (probably), etc.

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If most of you are interested, I will publish the next free deep dive on OOP :)

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