Class with too many parameters: better design strategy?

Question

I am working with models of neurons. One class I am designing is a cell class which is a topological description of a neuron (several compartments connected together). It ha

Answer 1

could you supply some example code of what you are working on? It would help to get an idea of what you are doing and get help to you sooner.

If it's just the arguments you are passing to the class that make it long, you don't have to put it all in __init__. You can set the parameters after you create the class, or pass a dictionary/class full of the parameters as an argument.

class MyClass(object):

    def __init__(self, **kwargs):
        arg1 = None
        arg2 = None
        arg3 = None

        for (key, value) in kwargs.iteritems():
            if hasattr(self, key):
                setattr(self, key, value)

if __name__ == "__main__":

    a_class = MyClass()
    a_class.arg1 = "A string"
    a_class.arg2 = 105
    a_class.arg3 = ["List", 100, 50.4]

    b_class = MyClass(arg1 = "Astring", arg2 = 105, arg3 = ["List", 100, 50.4])