On June 18th, 2013, noon UTC, Stephen Gallagher wrote:

In my opinion, it would be preferable to implement get_property_value() method for standard objects. The "pythonic" way of handling this is just as it currently is: object.property contains the value. Returning the dictionary would be a bad idea, as for complex objects this may result in a huge waste of memory for the common case. If you want a handy dictionary like that, I'd recommend making it a separate function from object.properties() like object.properties_dict() with a note in the pydoc that it may result in significant memory overhead.

To sum up:
I suggest adding:
.get_property_val(property_name) that can internally use getattr() to retrieve the value, hiding it from the public interface

Optionally, if it is useful in some situations, we can add
.properties_dict() which will return a full dictionary of all properties, at the expense of memory.

If you implement both of these, please do *not* implement get_property_val() using properties_dict(), as this would be inefficient.

This sounds reasonable.

- Peter

On June 18th, 2013, 1:10 p.m. UTC, Peter Hatina wrote:

Honza S.:

In a lmishell script I want to manually loop over all properties and get their values. I can use _LmiInstance.properties() to get list of properties, but there is no way, how to get property values. Either _LmiInstance.properties() should return a dictionary or there should be _LmiInstance.get_property(name) method.

Sample code:

i = c.root.cimv2.LMI_StorageExtent.first_instance()
for p in i.properties:
    print p, i.get_property(p)

-----

There is a way, how to get properties:

i = c.root.cimv2.LMI_StorageExtent.first_instance()
for p in i.properties:
    print p, getattr(i, p)
             ^^

Or how to get Names property value:
i.Names

Dunno, if it is a correct (python) way. Maybe it should be switched to a "dictionary style". I used this attitude just because of methods access.