How to get outer class name from an inner class?

[Steve Howell]

On May 8, 1:05 pm, John Gordon <gor... at panix.com> wrote:
> I'm trying to come up with a scheme for organizing exceptions in
> my application.
>
> Currently, I'm using a base class which knows how to look up the text
> of a specific error in a database table, keyed on the error class name.
>
> The base class looks like this:
>
> class ApplicationException(Exception):
>     """Base class for application-specific errors."""
>
>     def get_message(self):
>         """Return the error message associated with this class name."""
>
>         class_name = self.__class__.__name__
>         return UserMessage.objects.get(key=class_name).text
>
> And then I define a bunch of subclasses which all have different names:
>
> class QuestionTooShortError(NetIDAppsError):
>     """User entered a security question which is too short."""
>     pass
>
> class QuestionTooLongError(NetIDAppsError):
>     """User entered a security question which is too long."""
>     pass
>
> This scheme works, but I'd like to make it more streamlined.  Specifically,
> I'd like to group the classes underneath a parent class, like so:
>
> class Question(ApplicationException):
>
>     class TooShort(ApplicationException):
>         pass
>
>     class TooLong(ApplicationException):
>         pass
>
> This will make it easier in the future for organizing lots of sub-errors.
>
> My problem is this: the get_message() method in the base class only knows
> the current class name, i.e. "TooShort" or "TooLong".  But that's not
> enough; I also need to know the outer class name, i.e. "Question.TooShort"
> or "Question.TooLong".  How do I get the outer class name?

This may be somewhat relevant to you, although it doesn't specifically
answer your question for pre-3.3:

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3155/ (Qualified name for classes
and functions)