Monkey patching a @property

Question

Is it at all possible to monkey patch the value of a @property of an instance of a class that I do not control?

class Foo:
    @property
    def bar         


        

Answer 1

Idea: replace property descriptor to allow setting on certain objects. Unless a value is explicitly set this way, original property getter is called.

The problem is how to store the explicitly set values. We cannot use a dict keyed by patched objects, since 1) they are not necessarily comparable by identity; 2) this prevents patched objects from being garbage-collected. For 1) we could write a Handle that wraps objects and overrides comparison semantics by identity and for 2) we could use weakref.WeakKeyDictionary. However, I couldn't make these two work together.

Therefore we use a different approach of storing the explicitly set values on the object itself, using a "very unlikely attribute name". It is of course still possible that this name would collide with something, but that's pretty much inherent to languages such as Python.

This won't work on objects that lack a __dict__ slot. Similar problem would arise for weakrefs though.

class Foo:
    @property
    def bar (self):
        return 'original'

class Handle:
    def __init__(self, obj):
        self._obj = obj

    def __eq__(self, other):
        return self._obj is other._obj

    def __hash__(self):
        return id (self._obj)


_monkey_patch_index = 0
_not_set            = object ()
def monkey_patch (prop):
    global _monkey_patch_index, _not_set
    special_attr = '$_prop_monkey_patch_{}'.format (_monkey_patch_index)
    _monkey_patch_index += 1

    def getter (self):
        value = getattr (self, special_attr, _not_set)
        return prop.fget (self) if value is _not_set else value

    def setter (self, value):
        setattr (self, special_attr, value)

    return property (getter, setter)

Foo.bar = monkey_patch (Foo.bar)

f = Foo()
print (Foo.bar.fset)
print(f.bar)  # baz
f.bar = 42    # MAGIC!
print(f.bar)  # 42