pymongo and attribute dictionaries

[Travis Griggs]

I really like pymongo. And I really like Python. But one thing my fingers really get tired of typing is

someDoc[‘_’id’]

This just does not roll of the fingers well. Too many “reach for modifier keys” in a row. I would rather use

someDoc._id

Googling shows that I’m not the first to want to do this in the general sense (e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4984647/accessing-dict-keys-like-an-attribute-in-python).

Arguments aside of whether this should or shouldn’t be done, I want to know how I might solve this with Python. Consider it an academic pursuit.

The problem I have is not how to do the AttributeDictionary subclass, there are plenty of those examples. The problem is that the pymongo APIs already return dictionaries. In a language (Smalltalk, Objective-C, Ruby) that supports class extensions, that would be my first tool of choice to solve this problem. I’d just extend Dictionary to behave the way I want and be done with it. I can’t do that in Python though. I guess I could make my own module that subclasses the relevant pymongo classes, and do super() calling implementations of all of the relevant methods, coercing the return type. That is a maintenance headache though.

What are my options, if any?