Pylint false positives

[Frank Millman]

"D'Arcy Cain"  wrote in message 
news:6b4b8587-46c0-19b0-c538-efdf396f037b at VybeNetworks.com...
>
> On 2018-08-14 04:58 AM, Frank Millman wrote:
> > As an example, I have a master class defining a unit of data (i.e. the
> > value of a column) retrieved from a database. I have separate
> > sub-classes for each data type - text, integer, date, etc. To ensure
> > that a value is valid before storing it as an instance attribute, I call
> > a method called 'check_value'. The details of check_value vary according
> > to the data type, but that is transparent to the piece of code that
> > calls check_value().
>
> class classA:
>   DATATYPE = None # Or default type
>
>   def check_value(self, v)
>     if not isinstance(v, self.DATATYPE):
>       raise RuntimeError("Invalid data type for '%s'" % v)
>
> class classB(classA):
>   DATATYPE = int
>
> Very simplistic and untested but does that give you any ideas?
> Hopefully your email client doesn't mess up the formatting.  You can
> fill out check_value to do more than simply check the the type matches
> and you can also do further checks based on the type.  Also, you can
> have more than one sub-class doing the same check without having to cut
> and paste code from another class.
>

Thanks, D'Arcy. That is a neat idea if all you want to do is check the data 
type, but I do a lot more than that.

How would you extend it without a long chain of
    if isinstance(v, str):
      [perform checks for str]
    elif isinstance(v, int)
      [perform checks for int]
    etc
    etc

I find that using a separate method per subclass does exactly what I want, 
and that part of my project has been working stably for some time.

The only thing that has changed is that I recently started using pylint (as 
a result of switching my editor to VS Code).

My main class has the following method (simplified) -

class Field:
    def setval(self, value):  # handle value received from external source

        """
        checkval is a method defined in each subclass
        it does a bit of typecasting, so value is replaced on return
        it can raise an exception, which is caught elsewhere
        """

        value = self.checkval(value)  # this is the line that pylint 
complains about

        [various other checks]
        if all checks are passed:
            self._value = value

Frank